You back out of the driveway with your eyes on the mirror 
but the line you’ve been composing distracts 
and the garbage truck spinning its wheels on the ice comes  
out of nowhere and the poem you’re thinking of now  
 
in slow motion is ironic and slick, moving sideways 
in the heat of its melting under the stutter of antilock brakes.  
Fortunately, the top of your head is intact,  
though metaphors for poem-making collide 
 
as, caught with the net down, you lift your racket 
to serve the shuttlecock topic straight to the listener,  
take that, only to have it lofted back in a high slow arc  
from the tap of the reader’s gut-strings, a give-and-take. 
 
Maybe you paint your face in lightning strikes,  
quadrants of black and white, lipstick a cupid’s bow,  
add a curly wig, and no one can fail to look, though 
it’s a mask, the greasepaint you wipe off at night.  
 
You want to preserve what once flashed rainbow 
leaping out of the water but make a taxidermist’s poem 
that startles but doesn’t move, stuffed with the mind’s 
newspapered expectations, cotton-batting beliefs, 
 
or a Monarch unfolds her orange and black wings,  
curls six feet around your finger as you watch her close  
and disclose her marks–and the mind opens, too,  
admitting the skies of migration, the delicate probing touch.