Listening to the poets
that I love
introduce their poems,
talking the air
into images with their
beautiful hands, like flying sculptures,
we learn, as they
explain a little
(or a lot)
at long last what they mean!
What I want
is to stand up
right in the middle
of one of those
stunning explanations,
I want to shout
to the poet, over the heads
of the shocked crowd:
'Why didn't you put
those brilliant things
you just said
into your poem
in the first place?'
Why don't the poets
that I love
listen to me when I insist
that the footnotes
to the poem
be in the poem,
(like facts embedded
in the stream)-
all the little pebbles
that hold the water
that runs over them
in place...