Patricia Goedicke

“Though it looks like a throat, it is not.”

I never knew that she’d known

Both Frost and Auden.

She once told me that I spoke

More poetry than I seemed

To know how to write,

That my use of metaphor 

Was all in my talk.

She said this in her driveway

On a winter day

In Missoula, Montana,

Between piles of dirty snow,

As if to say, “how bizarre,”

And I can’t say I blamed her,

And I never forgave her.