Throat Singing
Next Time
As I was batting around the ball
of an idea, it turned into a bird --
unfolded -- the way I hope
a poem unfolds and startles me.
I'd like to be a bird next time.
Birds don't need to learn
to love the world. Gray sky
is a stone any bird can enter.
Or, I'll be a black-eyed seal
that breaks the surface, shiny
with news of its deeper life --
the way I hope to come back
as a poem that surfaces,
re-surfaces, keeps glistening.
originally in Poetry East