Shape Shifter

The Other Writers Block (1999)

1
A student stands in my doorway
confessing some desperate
"blockage in my creative faculties"
and before I can inquire
if she really talks like that
or if she picked it up, like Strep,
by listening too closely to exalted professors
at our "institution of higher learning,"
she tilts her head and does something
funny with her eyes and then
her lips, and says I wouldn't
understand, that nothing like that
could ever happen to me.

2
Remembering unfinished poems
from the beginning of the term,
I try to name once again
the stack of papers on the front
right corner of the desk,
I call it "a mountain," then
"dunghill." The phrase "a ringing"
telephone I don't want to answer,"
runs through my head. Next
it's "a bouquet." The pen scratches
on a piece of scrap "the tears
of black desire in a white sea,"
and crosses it out. Finally, I hear
"sprouting voices singing the irradiated
waltz in the polluted compost
of the twentieth century." The hour
passed, I put away my pen and
amble to my morning composition
class, leaving the "metaphors"
ungraded and unremarked.

3
Even though it's my office hour,
I imagine that, if I shut
the door and stanch the flow
of words not my own, some trickle
from the reservoir of either hope or
memory might moisten the dry
arroyos of "my personal voice."
The lessons, "write everyday,"
"write the things you care about,"
"write from your own perspective"
begin to crowd the corridor and soon
one of them gets rowdy and rips
from the closed door my favorite
wry New Yorker cartoon.
Then all hell breaks loose and pretty
soon James Wright come barreling
in screaming, "I have wasted my life,"
and Rilke returns from the realm
of angles, whispering, "You must
your life change." I begin
to envision myself an astronaut
or a penitent, anything cut off
and alone, a piece of string,
an insect husk. And just when I'm
about to yell they must silence
themselves and stand in line
like everything else, someone knocks,
and before I can ignore "him or her,"
a student opens the door and asks,
"Have you graded my essay, yet?"