The Regret of the Poet after sending Work to a Magazine

by Dawn Potter

Countless smart people have ordered you to buck up.
This tottering world, they claim, requires you.
Thus you obediently cram everything you’ve written
into a virtual envelope and shoot it into the aether.

Meanwhile, two young guys have ripped out
the third-floor skylights of the house next door.
Now they are propped waist-high in the open holes,
and they are murmuring to one another —

maybe about measurements or lunch,
maybe about the baby-blue sky
dangling like a stage set behind their curly heads.
This opus you’ve invented is altogether fraudulent.

You, with your feet planted boringly on the ground,
cannot compete with an air-show.
A vortex of gulls circles overhead.
Fingers of loose shingles waver beneath a modest sunbeam.

How is it possible to buck up?
Every word you’ve written has already been lived better.
Publish a thousand poems and you won’t escape
the same old keening sorrow —

you, there, weighed down with your concrete galoshes
and your armload of Danger signs,
squinting up at two young steeple-jacks and wondering
how anyone manages to end a poem with hope.