If I said I meant Easter eggs as in video games, would that make you want to read this?

I think the reason so many people don't like poetry is because it seems to take an awful lot of work to get to the bottom of a poem.  It's like digging for Easter eggs.  That's why I didn't really get into poetry until I discovered Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton.  They are two confessional poets, and that just made what they were writing so much more accessible.  Then there's Billy Collins.  Billy Collins was the Poet Laureate of the U.S. in 2001.  Poet Stephen Dunn once said about him, "He doesn't hide things from us, as I think lesser poets do. He allows us to overhear, clearly, what he himself has discovered."  I leave you the following poem, and you can see if you think that holds true:

Introduction to Poetry

-Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

Mr. Daniel

When I was in high school, I took a speech class at the insistence of a friend and also because it was a prerequisite to TV and video classes.  Speech was taught by a strange little man named Mr. Daniel.  He always made a big deal about how there was no "s" at the end of his name.  It was very important that we remember that.  He was the type of person you could see wearing a bow tie.  He was short, with a mustache and glasses.  I always wondered what Mr. Daniel wished he could be doing instead of teaching.  We got the sense that he hated kids and that he felt his talents were being wasted on us.  He had a great respect for theater arts and expected nothing less from his students. 

One of our assignments in that class was to read a fairytale in front of everyone.  I wanted to pick the perfect story, but I also didn't want it to be the same old thing we'd all heard a hundred times.  That's when I discovered Anne Sexton's Transformations.  As Kurt Vonnegut writes in the foreword, ". . . she was, in fact, retelling many of the Grimms' fairy tales in poetry. . . How do I explain these poems?  Not at all.  I quit teaching in colleges because it seemed so criminal to explain works of art.  The crisis in my teaching career came, in fact, when I faced an audience which expected me to explain Dubliners by James Joyce.  I was game.  I'd read the book.  But when I opened my big mouth, no sounds came out."

I read out Anne Sexton's "Cinderella" in class.  Terrified, I kept my legs crossed one over the other the entire time I was standing at the front of the room as if I had to pee.  When I finished, Mr. Daniel looked at me.  My heart was thumping in my ears.  He looked down his nose and then he said, "Tell me . . . why aren't you entering speech contests?"  I was so taken aback I didn't have an answer.  And then he busted me for the way I was standing.

The next year I enrolled in Mr. Daniel's TV and video classes.  We were responsible for producing the morning news.  We arrived at 6:30 am every morning to get it going.  One morning, early in the school year, Mr. Daniel had a heart attack as we were getting ready to put on the news.  He died at school. 

I remember watching him get wheeled out on a stretcher, sheet over his head, through the school's front doors.  And now when I think about him, I think about what he had wished for himself.  Did he still think he had plenty of time to achieve his dreams?  How sudden life is.

Cinderella

You always read about it:
the plumber with the twelve children
who wins the Irish Sweepstakes.
From toilets to riches.
That story.

Or the nursemaid,
some luscious sweet from Denmark
who captures the oldest son's heart.
from diapers to Dior.
That story.

Or a milkman who serves the wealthy,
eggs, cream, butter, yogurt, milk,
the white truck like an ambulance
who goes into real estate
and makes a pile.
From homogenized to martinis at lunch.

Or the charwoman
who is on the bus when it cracks up
and collects enough from the insurance.
From mops to Bonwit Teller.
That story.

Once
the wife of a rich man was on her deathbed
and she said to her daughter Cinderella:
Be devout. Be good. Then I will smile
down from heaven in the seam of a cloud.
The man took another wife who had
two daughters, pretty enough
but with hearts like blackjacks.
Cinderella was their maid.
She slept on the sooty hearth each night
and walked around looking like Al Jolson.
Her father brought presents home from town,
jewels and gowns for the other women
but the twig of a tree for Cinderella.
She planted that twig on her mother's grave
and it grew to a tree where a white dove sat.
Whenever she wished for anything the dove
would drop it like an egg upon the ground.
The bird is important, my dears, so heed him.

Next came the ball, as you all know.
It was a marriage market.
The prince was looking for a wife.
All but Cinderella were preparing
and gussying up for the event.
Cinderella begged to go too.
Her stepmother threw a dish of lentils
into the cinders and said: Pick them
up in an hour and you shall go.
The white dove brought all his friends;
all the warm wings of the fatherland came,
and picked up the lentils in a jiffy.
No, Cinderella, said the stepmother,
you have no clothes and cannot dance.
That's the way with stepmothers.

Cinderella went to the tree at the grave
and cried forth like a gospel singer:
Mama! Mama! My turtledove,
send me to the prince's ball!
The bird dropped down a golden dress
and delicate little slippers.
Rather a large package for a simple bird.
So she went. Which is no surprise.
Her stepmother and sisters didn't
recognize her without her cinder face
and the prince took her hand on the spot
and danced with no other the whole day.

As nightfall came she thought she'd better
get home. The prince walked her home
and she disappeared into the pigeon house
and although the prince took an axe and broke
it open she was gone. Back to her cinders.
These events repeated themselves for three days.
However on the third day the prince
covered the palace steps with cobbler's wax
and Cinderella's gold shoe stuck upon it.
Now he would find whom the shoe fit
and find his strange dancing girl for keeps.
He went to their house and the two sisters
were delighted because they had lovely feet.
The eldest went into a room to try the slipper on
but her big toe got in the way so she simply
sliced it off and put on the slipper.
The prince rode away with her until the white dove
told him to look at the blood pouring forth.
That is the way with amputations.
They just don't heal up like a wish.
The other sister cut off her heel
but the blood told as blood will.
The prince was getting tired.
He began to feel like a shoe salesman.
But he gave it one last try.
This time Cinderella fit into the shoe
like a love letter into its envelope.

At the wedding ceremony
the two sisters came to curry favor
and the white dove pecked their eyes out.
Two hollow spots were left
like soup spoons.

Cinderella and the prince
lived, they say, happily ever after,
like two dolls in a museum case
never bothered by diapers or dust,
never arguing over the timing of an egg,
never telling the same story twice,
never getting a middle-aged spread,
their darling smiles pasted on for eternity.
Regular Bobbsey Twins.
That story.

You're apologizing to me?

Back in college I wrote a poem that included a line I thought was pretty great: "a stitch that itches the womb."  The poem itself wasn't anything special.  It was about humanity, which is basically the broadest topic you could pick to write about, and I only decided to do it because I saw a magazine in the supermarket that had a photo essay on fetuses.  I had to have an assignment to turn in the next day.  Boom.  Fetus poem.  I secretly loved that one line, though.

I was a little nervous when I had to read the poem out in class because I knew my theme was flimsy to say the least.  There's always that moment after you read something out loud where the whole room is silent, taking it in, and you wonder which way the audience is going to tip.  But it was that line, only that line, that saved me.  I got a lot of praise for it, with my professor specifically picking it out.  "A really nice use of internal rhyme," she said, "I love the way it plays on the tongue."

The trouble is, after I turned the poem in, I suddenly wondered, did I write that?  Was that my original line?  Could I really come up with something so neat?  Did I subconsciously plagiarize it? I was reading a lot of Plath and Sexton at the time.  It did sound distinctly Plath to me . . .

I didn't want to know.  If I wasn't capable of that level of grown-up writing, and if even my own brain was overcompensating, then I'd rather just leave well enough alone.  I avoided the Google search box.  I ignored the book Ariel sitting on my shelf.  There was one poem I suspected I borrowed from in that collection, and I didn't want to go near it.  So it went on for nine years until the day I recently lost my job.

Feeling sucker-punched and directionless, I was questioning my purpose once again.  It was a familiar place to be.  I decided that I'd had enough.  I had to know: did I write that damn line?  To the Google search box!  I typed in the quote.  Something came up.

What's this?  An apology?  Google actually apologized for not being able to come up with an exact match.  I could scarcely dare to believe it.  There was only one other way to be sure.  To the bookshelf!

I went into my bedroom and dusted old Ariel off the shelf.  Even so many years later I still knew exactly which page to go to.  From a poem called Lady Lazarus:  "And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls."

That's it?  That's it???  Granted, that's a beautiful line, but I didn't plagiarize!  The stitch that itches was mine.  My line.  I wrote it.  Now, I feel safe to say, here is the poem:

Anyone Could Join the Circus

The first month we look like worms,
eyes in a sac, a stitch that itches the womb.
We are bulbs of flesh, photographed
for Time magazine's latest fetus spread.
This is how millions
discovered just how close we'd come
to being left in a shape nowhere near human,
had the covers been suddenly yanked
off our cozy amniotic waterbeds.

At three months we have the snouts of pigs.
At eight we could be the progeny of a pachyderm.
What is to keep us from popping out
with a small, wrinkled trunk in those last
two months?  Maybe those who are allergic
to peanuts have been the humans all along . . .

Would my mother have loved a child
more elephant than not?