If a learned man scans the work of your mind and finds the meter lacking (unrefined?) put a wolf in your poem. Because a wolf is not a symbol, it's a mammal, a carnivore. Like rusty train wrecks (in which steel cargo cars lie crumpled in a field beside aloof cattle) or someone else’s suffering, it’s hard to look away from a wolf. Make him surprisingly thin through the hips and thick around the forelegs and chest. He is just steps from the shadows of old conifer trees, bare trunked near the ground for having shaded each other out of flourishing. There should be a little snow on the ground, a veneer, with sharp grasses poking through, little spears of the earth around his paws. The ambiguity of not knowing if we are headed toward winter or spring keeps the reader’s eye moving from line to line because who can relax when a wolf, (eyes much smaller than legend would have it, much closer together on his triangle face, and more focused than the eyes of a loyal horse or family dog) is present? When he turns toward your reader, make sure it’s only his head that rotates—his body still oriented toward a grassy valley, mountains just beyond—where they meet, invoke the blue-green color of a bruise, healing.
Here are some things a person can fix: A flat tire, though, sometimes the tire’s not fixed, just replaced; a bad haircut, but, if it must be fixed now, the one solution is to take away more. Waiting for new growth is not fixing, it’s patience. A wooden spindle cracked in half when a chair’s knocked over in a fit of anger, can be smothered in wood glue and clamped with a vice. Sometimes you need new parts, sometimes you need mercy. See the shepherd boy in Germanic-looking shorts and funny hat cast in porcelain? He has that dreamy look figurines like to take, an ornamental gaze, a self-indulgent gaze of unnamed sorrow. The real boy leaping from cushion to flowered cushion, arms in the shape of an airplane, will knock the figure from the shadow box (a ping of fissured porcelain on a pinewood floor) and having looked at nothing sorrowful in all his life, will afterwards, feel ashamed. And will afterwards apply himself to fixing: chairs and tchotchkes, bicycle chains, lawn mowers, picture frames— but wondering, always, how to fix the whole world?
Stuck in my craw: To say, I praise you, is not to praise. It rattles hollow—one penny in a tin can bank. The can in an empty room sounds its echoing clang, the clang diminishing, the way a cry for help falls deeper into canyons in cowboy movies— the half-life of sound, shrinking. But the sound of flattery (which has volume) is not praise. Praise the world by making lists? -An old hand, veiny, along a banister in half-light -A honeybee landing on a curved branch of catmint, bobbing -Clean fire on a cold night No. Say praise and mean tell the truth. Say praise but mean, I don’t deserve what is here. What is here is the penny— its small, raised face so serious and precise. Who decided the least worthy coin should be the loveliest color? Who invented the tin can bank, soft beans swapped for copper-joy of small value? It rattles, not hollow, but makes solid sounds like pangs (of hunger, regret) and a baby laughs at the sound, a deep, flowering laugh, growing louder as it spreads. She laughs at the penny sound, at how silly all the small things are.
Theresa Monteiro lives in New Hampshire with her husband and six children. She is a former teacher and holds an MFA from the University of New Hampshire. She has had poems published in The American Journal of Poetry, On the Seawall, River Heron Review, Pittsburgh Poetry Journal, Tipton Poetry Journal, Black Fork Review, Presence, The Meadow, Banyan Review, Cutbank Literary Journal, and Dunes Review. She received the Dick Shea Memorial Prize for poetry in 2019.
Illustrations of various patents printed in “Cycling Art, Energy, and Locomotion: A Series of Remarks on the Development of Bicycles, Tricycles, and Man-Motor Carriages” by Robert Pittis Scott (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1889). From Public Domain Review.
