Collaboration #11 Guillermo Delgado’s image, Anita Skeen responded

Guillermo Delgado's Untitled #11, 2009, mixed media on wood, 10'' x 10.25''

 What Can Happen

 Every poet writes a poem
 about writing a poem:  the first

 poem, weak in the knees
 and suffering acne; the last poem,

 confident in voice but unprepared
 to acknowledge it will have no successors.

 There’s the poem about why
 it is not a poem (which is usually

 the case) and the poem of longing
 for a poem, the one of looking

 for a poem, the one of discovering
 the poem in some unexpected

 lair:  on a flowchart,
 in a possum’s tail spoken by

 someone named Ashley.
 The poet might claim the poem

 has written itself, or sprung
 full-worded onto the page like Athena

 from the head of Zeus (never mind
 the woman he must have swallowed).

 A young poet writes of his honeymoon
 with the poem, how together 

 they will sail to the lost continent
 of love.  A survivor poet 

 knows that boat’s going down,
 listens, marvels at how

 words can take wing
 from a concocted thing,

 circle free, imagine their way
 to another fiction.

                                                     6/13/09