MindSpinner

The moon hangs poised
half in light
half in shadow
just above the apex
of my neighbor’s roof
as if to balance there
in the coming blue of day.
Moon storms whip unseen
along the knife edge
of its stilled Picasso profile,
where light plunges
into shadow
and shadow disappears
half a face.

Comment: If you were to visit and revisit this site in the hours after I post a poem, you’d think you were losing your mind, for every time you look, something is likely to have been changed. I must have altered this poem twenty times today, and I’m not taking bets on whether the tinkering is done. A poem is done when it stops asking for every note to be sounded and heard again and again, until all are tuned true, until nothing could or should be different than it is. The whole business seems to be up to the poem. (I have stopped querying my poems about whether they are good poems or bad poems or mediocre poems or whether they are like anybody else’s poems at all.) Finally a poem will say, “You can go away now and do as you please, for I am what I am to be.” The poem is not thereby agreeing to leave me alone for good, of course. It has signed no contract. It reserves the right to be fickle and to demand my attention all over again at will.

All those who hanker after finality should know that all poems will be certifiably done when I am dead.