Writer’s Block

Of course, there’s always love,
or work, death or sex, these last two
intertwined sometimes like kudzu
in a Georgia field, and let’s not set aside
the big N as in Nature, carrying the bulk
of poems on its diurnal back.

In a pinch, something surreal might do,
sheep in wolf’s clothing, grass
that’s greener on both sides, a candle
lit and burning at neither end,

though anything oddly domestic
will serve as well, a staircase
rising to nowhere but the ceiling,
clean laundry on a clothesline
billowing like seraphs, or bread crumbs
leading away from the garden gate.

Whatever you choose, the hope is
to begin with something open-ended,
some small parabola of thought
which might suddenly zoom you
in a gust of inspiration
upward on hoof and wing

where you might rarely travel
in your prim and Sunday clothes,
but from under whose sleeves
there might appear
in one epiphanous moment
the utter stranger
you have always been.