Tuesday

I waited all day for Beckian Fritz Goldberg to arrive at her booth at AWP, the only poet I went to appeal alone. Still, when I told her the plain, obsessive facts of my love affair with her poem "Being Pharaoh"--how I'd memorized it, carried it in my car over every stitch of the last four years, she seemed almost amused. She said maybe I'd spent more time with it than she had. I don't know. It's a beautiful poem, and everything I feel right now, as it has been for every moment of the last four years. Sometimes I know exactly what she meant by her dismissiveness, and maybe that's a part of it. But tonight, it's rained relentlessly, and the rivers are all blown out, so instead of the Pharaoh,  I'll give you a bit of her "The Ventriloquist."

The coyote is out on the street, thinking, The riverbed has moved.
The actual river is there too, mumbling
Yes, the bed must be somewhere in this valley.

And when the rivers talks,
you will still not know the fat-child-faith of my heart.