Becoming Light

this fertile goddess
with her golden hair,

the curse of loving
that which causes pain,

Darling shoes,
beloved feet,
ten toes to walk me
toward my true love,

sometimes confused with love
which starts with L,
but could easily be I,

Their tap taptap on the airport runway
tells me the story
of a lovely, lonely woman flying after love—
that old, old story
in a new pair
of shoes.

The poet must abolish I,
said Keats;

Alphabet Poem: To the Letter I

have no identity,
be as water flowing
around a rock—
a voice for all
the unsaid waves within,
antenna of the deep.

people dig through tattered anthologies to find the fitting words.

“Poetry is the honey of all flowers; the quintessence of all sciences…the marrow of wit…the very phrase of angels,” said Thomas Nashe, Shakespeare’s contemporary, in 1592. And so it still remains.