in it. Life
story at age fourteen sifted 
through a rabbit.

It had a tattoo on a hand 
in it. And cherries, the kind 
that come in a can.

She tended
toward rabbits back then. 
Toward the theoretically mild

that are really
wild. Like ducks on a pond 
that is really a moon

full of menacing weeds.
The duck gets ready for noon, 
she wrote. Yes,

nonsense, I guess.
She embroidered a poem 
on a foam

pillow with a felt pen. 
Pinned an actual 
cherry on it back then.

period, not a menstrual 
one. An it,
not a pet.

Once rendered from the animal 
of the imagination,
it is dead,

an elephant-shaped 
table, not
an elephant.

What is the opposite 
of kinetic? It is that. 
The blood has been let

from the jet
and yet it has a beauty 
to it.

Come to terms
by abstracting
him. Mondrian
came to terms with trees
until he reached
“Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow”

and not a tree in sight. 
For was it really
that big a deal? Kenneth 
like a puppet
on a children’s show. 
Horn rims and all.

Gross, as Gwendolyn Brooks 
shouted: “Que tu es grossier!” 
Reading her great
poem “Riot”
loud in a hot room, rattled
the chandelier. And “The Ballad

of Pearl May Lee.”
She
redeemed all
that came before and after.
I knew little of Kenneth, his 
fame, hired as his

amanuensis. “Take 
dictation, Miss Hathaway!” 
Retyping his screwy 
manuscript
with cartoonish revision 
symbols like a tumble

of marshmallows
from the Lucky Charms box. 
The job was a gift
from the gods until
he jumped
me. His body

like a board used
for paddling children. 
He pulled a pearly 
button off my one 
dress and dropped it 
to the floor

where it spun like
a top
and it spun like that
and spun like that past 
even his death,
spins still, and will

until I stop it. 
There. I stopped it.