Everybody is celebrating National Poetry Month.
But not Mrs. Wallace Stevens.
Outliving your mister
by one hundred years
and counting is not wifely,
Mrs. Wallace Stevens.
Your face on a dime,
Mrs. Wallace Stevens,
is now worth $849,
if full bands.
No somatic memory of the poet
or the policy or the note
from the bank addressed
to Mrs. Wallace Stevens.
Mrs. Wallace Stevens is counting breath mints.
Your fear of R2D2 is not so charming
after all these years, the blips and
bleeps translate to this: Take a letter,
Mrs. Wallace Stevens.
You–Mrs. Wallace Stevens–resisted
his intelligence successfully.
Mrs. Wallace Stevens overheard
saying to the girl poet in the hall:
You do look like a pool. You do,
you do, you do.
Crazy, crazy, crazy. Sincerely, Mrs. Wallace Stevens.
Letting Hemingway kick his ass for you, nearly
forgotten now. And Mrs. Wallace Stevens posing
for that picture with the fattest cat on the porch.
The built-up shoes, the trick knees,
the canoe floating above the head of
Mrs. Wallace Stevens, who pretends to carry
her share of the load in shallow waters.
Mrs. Wallace Stevens misheard blackboard and
imagined drawing flight and then misunderstood.
Almost certainly undiagnosed early Alzheimer’s.
And now so late, Mrs. Wallace Stevens.
The tennis racket, the butterfly net, the flyswatter.
Apt metaphors for Mrs. Wallace Stevens. And a dry
erase marker resting on a stepstool.