I Don't Mind the Mess that Comes from Pressing Hard, from Scribbling Over Scribbling to Cross Things Out (But I Hate Erasable Ink)

I can tell the sky that for nine years I listened
to a daughter begging for a puppy.
That after nine years I heard a mother relent. That nine
generations of mayflies, I'm thinking, is how a middle-aged
walleye counts that. The puppy learns to come,
if you were wondering, to Patches. I tell
Patches that the kind of dog I'd love best
wouldn't do a thing for you if you called it
the same name twice. The names
I've been called for mimicking the kind of dog
I'd love! I'd love to know if an egg
is as great a thing to live inside of
as it seems to be. This point of view
of mine is the point of view of the hatched
in a mean motherfucker of a world
when memory fails. Once
I was forever changed by a brush
not with death, but with a willingness to give up
life for a cause. I don't remember
what the cause was. I never wrote it
down. It has everything to do with
why sitting, just sitting, the day an unfilled-in blank,
why it feels, sometimes, like running
on a trick ankle, other times like labored flying,
like I'm doing it on a surgically repaired wing,
like there's a there out there I'm
too injured from failed prior attempts
to get to, and I've got to be content
with that, as athletes and their career-ending injuries,
their trick knees, are content learning to love
their ability to sense then predict
a sudden change in weather.

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Copyright © 2011 Matt Mauch All rights reserved
from Salt Hill Journal
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission