The Finch at the Feeder

“It’s all a draft until you die.”
–Ellen Bryant Voigt


For breakfast I had fruit crepes with cream cheese and toast. Steak and eggs. Biscuits and brown gravy. A grapefruit divided—sliced in midair and sugared over. It is all a draft until you die? Of course it is. Revision is constant—as endless as sex can seem, when you’re doing it right—and fundamentally self-propelling. The facts are relative things that aren’t half as important as Entertainment Value. I think I heard that on the news.

I read the words “Final Draft” and laugh. I think of 8th grade history class, a weekly paper on any significant event. What could we do but rewrite the past?

The truth is, I feel like I’m drowning. The fact is, I’ve been fighting for the waterline since I first put the pen to the page. Some days I’m in a rental chair, reclining with a mojito I mixed myself. Others, I’m barefoot, running for a Frisbee someone threw me. I always hope it was my father, but he’s revising, too.

Anything can be unmade. Kafka wanted everything burned. Dickinson lived at the bottom of a drawer. The best is never the best. It’s what floats up to the surface after being washed over, over, over.

For over a decade I’ve written the same poem in three hundred and forty-five ways. I’ve taken a red pen to every one. No one will say it, but we need it there. The carrot, rotting on the string, hanging out in front of our faces. If we caught it, wouldn’t we stop moving? Get a real job? Settle down?