Under the cover of novels, I write poems.
Between the first chapter where my heroine
meets her hero and the second where they fall
in love, I scribble a sonnet or I read a poem
by Billy Collins and fall in love again
with poetry. Why go to the trouble
of describing the house, the doctor, the malady,
when all I need is Emily’s fly buzzing
in the sickroom or Blake’s wildflower
to understand eternity in four lines?.
Periodically, I ask myself why. Why
give up my quiet isle of Innisfree
to board a noisy ocean liner, filled
with characters in conflict, squabbling
with each other or themselves until
three hundred pages later they decide
to change their lives? Believe me, I believe
everyone needs a voyage, a week on deck
with all the messy, roiling humanity
a heart can take, but then come home to this.
In Catholic school, I’d tuck my Leaves of Grass
inside my opened catechism book—
How many persons in one God? I’d yawn
and end up poring through the lustier poems
omitted from our Whitman sampler. Did I
already understand that subterfuge
is part of poetry, that I have to tell the truth
but tell it slant? That on board, when asked
by a fellow passenger, “What do you do?”
I should answer, “I write, mostly novels.”