To be the Mary J. Blige of poetry to come back as Peter O’Toole to have Peter Falk
expose his tender heart to you as John Cassavetes would make a monument to love
of a fragile wife with a nervous tic and strangers from a bar on the couch to be a poet
of the sea pounding down each syllable ‘til it resembles almost nothing but sound
between lovers to be an unscripted scene of oneself have a teardrop tattoo
inked beneath one eye to practice right action and right speech to summon a stiff drink
upon waking at the foot of a dune to be a grain of sand in that dune to be seen
up close at maximum magnification as intricate and entirely plausible
From Once More With Feeling (Veliz Books, 2017). Copyright © 2017 by Tina Cane. Used with the permission of the author.