Once, someone began a poem not long after the loss

of someone she loved, and which she never managed

to make work. Or at least this is the story I was told.

That although there was a moment in her drafts—

a cottonwood sun-drenched in a field—that seemed

more or less fine, she understood, after a few years,

the poem would only fail and so she began on a whim

moving her pen in loops across every line, taking

her time, taking care to darken the places where

her letters showed through, enjoying the act of making

her words disappear, letting the poem find a new shape

as what she drew extended into the white space, past

where her words stopped. When she stopped, she noticed

what she’d drawn resembled blades of grass or maybe

branches bent in a gust of wind. It’s hard to know—

isn’t it?—what we mean when we say a poem works.

She found a place to thumbtack the page above her desk

and although most of the time, when she remembers

to look at it, she sees scribbles of ink burying words,

there are days—hard earned—when she sees once again

the wind doing what it does or branches or grass,

the kind of thing she’d been trying to write all along.