So says my friend who doesn’t know it now
But he’s been conscripted to say what I shouldn’t
Want anyone to say too soon, too suddenly, too many times
More than must be said. It’s a tall order, or as another friend says
A tall drink of water, otherwise: it’s plain & simple:
What anyone wants most of all.
Another friend tells me I’m easy and means something sweetly as when
One caves with the slightest shudder somehow thoroughly.
Another says what you say should be in a poem which means
Someone is taking for me the trouble to breathe, maybe fire.
Lucidity, quick and painlessly employed, kind of, as a kind nurse employs
Her rough pinch to be less strict than her needle’s as it settles into a vein
To take sufficient blood away somewhere to be deployed in centrifuge
To diagnose and otherwise and likewise and counterclockwise say, the way
Metaphor or blood can have the last word. In order to be sure of what the
Center is, everything has to spin away, I guess. Your words like a lost ghost
On a mission. I’ve never met a ghost who’s not on a mission.
Why otherwise bother to be a ghost's ghost?
When we write to ghosts we write on stony water. One can skip a stone
In order to pretend to find ten thousands things.
Nearby is very close.
Nearby I take your words to water. My ghosts are growing restless.
Copyright © 2013 by Dara Wier. Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-A-Day on June 10, 2013. Browse the Poem-A-Day archive.