Smooth and Rough

I had no idea that there would be so many ars poetica in this month of poems…but here’s another one.

Smooth and Rough

You need to know I’m north of the equator
else summer weather falling in November
means nothing. Not strange no matter where:
will winter be worse for ease we enjoy now?

When Al Young and Chitra Divakaruni
said just write the next poem, my brain
was too poorly fluted, lacked enough
hyperbolic structures to snag

their words that slid over me like rain slides
down window glass.  Not that I needed to know
what the next poem concerned, or that my lack
of a capital-P Project made me wary but

what I needed—correct that, wanted—was
certainty that the math would tick and tie,
reassurance the whole hand would be capable
of more than the thumb alone and further

I wanted to know I wasn’t accumulating
one long string of
indifferent thumbs