More challenging than And Her Soul Out of Nothing but very alive.

small quilled poem with no taste for spring

In spring all the poems that need
            to be written

Have. You are neither dejected
            nor relieved. Scrape and

Paint. Scrape and paint a
            grey house white.

Feel something! Your husband,
            the one married to all the appetites,

Shouts to someone up on a ladder,
            someone who looks sort of

Like you: disinterested, spated,
            thin as a cloud.

It’s spring again and so the
            melancholiacs. And so the fat

Sharp animals pace your roof
            at night: feeding, quilled, recurrent

Dreams. You will never live
            up to this

Life, they will never refer to
            you as voluptuous.

You can’t remember the
            last time

you wore a dress.             You
           pressed your mouth

To the phone.

(I probably got the spacings wrong, typing this from my handwritten note on scrap paper, over two months after I read this.)