These poems,
whose past Dali's Persistence of Memory
inspired me to preserve for some utilitarian ideal,
haunt me. I typed them twice and scattered
them like leaves across the four corners
of every person I'd ever known. Even
Ms. Watson, my eleventh grade English teacher
assured me they were the best she'd ever read.
She never told me she had spent
the previous year at the University of Texas
studying Mina Loy and Gertrude Stein.

Consider this excerpt:

Let us talk, then, you and I,
without the masks, without the lies.
Let us remove the half-closed window blinds
to see the sun as it is in full-blown day.
No more uncertain meanings,
no more uncertain clues,
no more secret truths
to hide between me and you.

I cringe with its every syllable,
the "no" colliding with "more" like
wind-swept skunk against five-buck cologne,
the hyphens of "half-closed" and "full-blown"
squinting like the eyes of misunderstood gods.

Lydia Minatoya, who claims,
"It doesn't matter what you do in the past,
only what you do in the future,"
doesn't persuade me.
There is something unforgivable about hours spent
extracting half-rhymes for "I" from
a pocket rhyming dictionary,
certain they would win a Pulitzer.

If I knew what to forgive, it'd be easier.
Is it the unremitting meter of lines five through eight,
derived from a David Bowie song
that lingers in my head after every reading?

Is it the girl I wrote this for, but never gave it to?
Or the first line's unapologetic bootleg of Prufrock,
revealing not a love of Eliot,
but the poem's incidental position as the
only reading assignment I completed in eleventh grade?

Is it the fact that having preserved it,
I can never take it back
and destroy its insufficiency?