You, the most fluid letter,
sometimes vowel,
sometimes consonant,
sometimes yin, sometimes yang.

Ye can be young as yolk
or an old yarn,
a variable, an ordinate.

Your nature is to question,
though your own answer
is often brief: yes.
(Or yeah, or yep, or yup.)

No yore without yesterday,
you are key to time,
the mystery of Yahweh.

You yearn to make noise
through yips, yelps, yowls,
yells and barbaric yawps.

Sometimes a place for yoga
or post-Yule exercise,
sometimes a foreign currency,
sometimes an obscure element.

Y’all can be yummy,
yeasty, yellow, yielding,
but, admit it, sometimes
a yo-yo, a yahoo.

Without you, adverbs
would be in short supply,
and I might be lone as a yucca,
not lonely as I yam.
                        

I have a life outside of geese and ponds
and marsh grasses. But you won’t find
much in the way of autobiography
in my work: nothing about sexual abuse
as a child, life as a lesbian in P-town,
even less about M., though we shared
a bed for more than four decades.
I leave those subjects to Sexton, Rich,
Hacker, and Olds. Like Dickinson,
I’m nobody most of the time, content
with forests of quiet around me. I am
somebody when alone in the woods
or at the shore, watching and writing.
Among crows and snakes and owls,
among moccasin flowers and moonlight,
this is where I feel more than ordinary.
The rest— engagements I try to avoid,
accolades and awards I never ask for,
books that outsell my contemporaries—
intrude upon my desire to watch and write.
I placed pencils in my favorite walnut trees 
after I found myself on an afternoon walk
without a writing instrument. That’s
the kind of life I lead. I look outward to see 
inward—the rest is simply inconsequential.
                        

Mac-n-cheese is my go-to comfort food:
a nice bubbly crust when it’s baked
yielding to a creamy gooiness beneath.
I’ve given it some thought, and it’s not
what I want to serve Sylvia Plath—
nothing involving ovens, I decide.

Then I remember a fact from her letters
and journals read during my infatuation
with suicidal poets period: her specialty
was a Campbell’s tomato soup cake,
so soup it is, my other cold-weather 
comfort food (not cake—I don’t want
to compete, and, again, no ovens!).
Red, I recall, was her favorite color,
and I’ll dot the soup with oyster crackers,
a nod to her New England upbringing.

Of course, I’ve long since ditched the can
for aseptic packaging—no sharp edges—
switched the glop for pourable soup,
though I still add milk, a pat of butter,
half a teaspoon of basil or oregano.
I think she’ll appreciate the gourmet touch,
but when she scrutinizes the bowl
and emotes in her best British accent,
I rise with my red hair, I know what’s 
coming next and wonder if I shouldn’t have
served American hot dogs instead.
Probably not the best time to argue that
while dying may be an art, I never
thought she did it exceptionally well.