"just one day..."

If
you'd have asked,
I might
have chosen...
for a day,
or even two...
to live
in that period
when
poets
were left to
find their center,
their heart,
their voice...
in
garrets,
while
living on weak tea, dry toast,
and
marmalade.

i'd have loved being
hermited in silence,
cloistered within
a woodland cabin, or
allowed to
gaze into the
grey atlantic
from the turret of
a sea captain's cottage...
for days on end
waiting for
a word...
just the right
word...
to slip over the horizon
like a lover
returning from
the brink of
"beyond this place
there be dragons,"

i would wander about with
ink-stained fingers in
linen nightgowns,
forgotten
hair held up in
pencils and
chopsticks as
mussed as a bird's nest
in spring...woven with
bits of ribbon, and
scattered with
lovely God-spun words
like
diaphanous and
tangential.

..and
longing...

oh yes, I would
pick words from the air
like apple blossoms
on a spring breeze...

I would gather them like
treasures of sea glass and
tiny shells..
collected from
an empty stretch of sand on
a stormy afternoon
with cloak wrapped tightly and
feet bare to the
surf's coming and going..

I would like to
ask for just one day...
one day a month,
a week,
a year,
a lifetime...
to be a poet,
lingering over one
perfectly
chosen
word so that
from its
placement on the
page,
within the context of
other perfect words...strung together
like pearls threaded on silk...
another
woman...

...standing at the end of a
Cornish seawall,
or curled on a sunny windowseast
holding a penned page...

is given the space
between the lines...
to weep
with
a fresh
hope that
she is not alone,
that she
is
understood
by another...
even
if just
for
that moment of
her
reading...