Some Notes I Should Not Have Pretended Were Poems

If you compose too many poems

On too broad a range of topics,

You’re bound to run into a few

Broaching the same topics in print

More profoundly than you have done.

I was happy once with a poem,

Or happy enough at the time,

In which, drying off on a shore

But chilled by abrupt sunshowers,

I contemplated the Devil

And who his wife might be, and why

We would use such an expression,

But finished up happy enough

Just to get sun back and get dry.

Natalie Shapero composed

A poem on the same expression

But dug under it, made it sting,

The Devil a trope for the man

Who beats, who paws, who gets away

With entitled hypocrisies

Concerning his wife, man who holds,

For some mysterious reason,

Several advanced degrees and yet

Seems luminous autodidact.

(That last detail makes me suspect

The poet had a specific,

Personal man-Devil in mind.)

I shrink from contact with the poem,

My mind like the mind of a child

Whose science project on earthquakes,

All gloop and mud and crumbled sticks

Leftover from popsicles, sits

Beside a steel, cantilevered

Model of an earthquake-proof bridge

At the fair. Oh mine? My poem? Mine

Wasn’t really serious, just

You know, I thought how weird is it,

To use such a vile expression

For meteorological

Paradox, rain through bright sunshine,

You know, and who is the Devil,

And who precisely is his wife,

And which is the rain, which the sun,

Mumble, mumble, um, never mind.

Forget I ever brought it up.

Please. And my jewel-wasp sonnet?

I see there’s a New Yorker poem,

Longer, more pointedly gendered,

On that topic as well. Sometimes

I’m glad no one’s read what I’ve done.