Meg McManama

Phases of the Poet

“…maybe the real danger and the real challenge for poets writing today is something else—namely, a kind of spiritual
anemia…. A bit of irony and a trace of mourning, that's all we are left with. What remains is the feeling that we’ve gained a
lot—a kind of aesthetic freedom, a kind of flexibility—but also lost something very significant. It’s too bad we can’t quite
remember what it was. Beauty? Passion? Soul?”  —Adam Zagajewski

In the beginning
I wanted 

    a plume
a deluge
a cicada
watch me play tennis
watch me play tennis with the net
down
watch me use my teeth to pull
the crescent moon off my nail
love is a net
love is
a net
watch me hemingway
watch me derrida
watch me eye-of-storm
this place to the ground
don’t ever have children
don’t go out in a windstorm
it’s best to cut things off
before an infection can take root
a spore
a leviathan
the smell of dead man’s fingers

here is my father’s watch
here is my mother’s journal
all of it into the wood stove
here are my coffee grounds
settling in like a scar
aren’t I a work of art

 —---
From the middle     to the end
I want 

a pilgrimage
a throb
a hankering

watch me climb
without hurting myself
watch me bandage this wound
after I’ve hurt myself
watch me keep my wits about me
in a windstorm
watch me keep walking
after I’ve failed to keep
my wits about me

           this is how to whisper

    a child is kicking my ribs
a child is inside my ribs
a child likes to remind me he is there

I contain multitudes

I will love my troubled father
I will shampoo my mother’s hair after her surgery
streams of moonlight through my fingers

a child shares a frozen blueberry with me
a child shows me how to rub the blueberry
on my lips to make them purple  

watch me pray
watch me be a bird
roosting in God’s roof

on my walk the Ancient of Days
reveals many things:
a beech tree wide
as a cottage
a rock wall knitted with moss
the lake’s longing
rivulets like angels
reach for my feet

aurora borealis
a new stretch mark
a slice of fresh bread

watch me live
watch me die
watch me put it into words

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