Driving Through Maspeth, NY, After Teaching an Introduction to Creative Writing Class

Sun squints off the side 

of a delivery truck 

like whisky poured 

over a glass of ice

in the Sexton poem where she 

is not dead but death’s 

opposite, being 

born and born. Repetition

is the music of memory

but it is also the petition of the dead,

always a place

where the steam from the factories

is the steam from the factory

of girlhood whose gift

you do not yet

know. The doll

in the poem is desire

and terror. You know this

from life, from the forest

in which the terrible 

thing that happened scratches 

the film of memory 

into the unbearable

static. You were not born

kneeling. The doll is no longer

before the thing 

that happens 

which can never be taken back.