After Marianne Moore

I, too, dislike it. What do you hope to obtain from this poem, after all?
To be told you’re a good girl? That it will be okay? It really won’t.
Perhaps you wish to admire your own feelings 
   as in a mirror?
   To hear that the nasturtium’s leaves 
      cup their little flowers like hell-flames against high wind?

Perhaps you read out of desire for light music, cultural clout, to meditate 
with mindfulness on the golden rose’s curdling.
No, no, I’ve got it - a prayer - a spell to utter
   on breath or in skull,
   solicit meaning or control.
      And I, of course, want to make time stand still. Or to be 

a part, to put it generously, of literature’s great, long conversation. 
Or somewhere to put this excess of love, though what does it help the rain I’m moved 
by the shining quietness of its multitudes, swearing: 
  I love you, as if the rain is a boy 
  that I’ve chased to an airport?
      I am embarrassing the rain. The rain would say: ‘shut up mum’. 

Or, wait, I write to tell you about my recurring dream. I’m curled in a ball, 
in a hole - an animal licking itself – and can smell the earth contract, world shrink 
to soil on my skin, but the shrinking doesn’t stop, 
   it occurs within my edges, 
   it’s death, I think, though there’s never quite 
      relief, only the ending juddering through me as some beast through a gate…

Have you found what you want in this poem yet? Truthfully, I hope you’re happy.
It’s grim, the way I’m never dead and neither are you, in this zombie apocalypse 
called poetry. Don’t the golden buds always push back through?
   Which is to say, the flames.
   Now, put this book down, step away,
      the galaxy still on your skin like a sheet of dirt.