Girl reading a letter at an open window – Johannes Vermeer

 

She’d been reading
my thought letters again

God how I wish
she’d stay out of my head!

Sitting, writing prose
words combined, patterns
seeing other ways
feelings, feelings,

She only had to look at me
without a word exchanged
between us,

She only had to wake
some memory
a thought that I’d had
thrown away, caught again

“Don’t you want to use this, again?”

Old thoughts, new thoughts
poems started, but never finished
worked over, recycled
never the same as before,

Being my best and my worst
critic,
wondering why my thoughts
grazed upon her image
a time, or two
often as not,

The greatest prose,
the best I’d ever written
could never compare,

Could never be published

She’d been reading
my thought letters again,

No thought of her
was ever discarded

Only placed in the deepest part
of my poet-writing
soul…..