In the Room of Glass Breasts

By Brenda Hillman

Around each word we're hearing,
there spins an original flame;
the unborn wait in a circle of commas,
upright robins wheel to Wheeler
& termites with arms in their heads
dig under the chairs—

It is impossible to describe the world;
that's why you get so sleepy listening to poetry.
The writer skates but spring takes
the gold (ooo don't let her fall in sequins)—dusk
buzzes in its meaning kit...

maybe you drank too much but that's not it:
the sexy cadence puzzled everyone.
You were drawn to poetry by something nothing
satisfies but poetry: boundless sensation,
an abstract tone—
then one day, two normal words
had made you weep: Unreal...City.... Not
mostly; mostly they didn't make you weep, but still:
Unreal... (then that big pause:)...
City.... Look at that slumped
italic guy over there, waiting to be in a stanza:
Sat low our lord of literature
for he was very tired—

Outside the room, the spell ends,
the vowel of an owl/the owl of a vowel
dives onto a warm body, the ruined gardens
of the state, tended by the great dead—
You were called by a silence you can't understand.
You're grown up now. You can read all night
if you want in the bride's bed—