Classic Poem

Here is a picture of the author, here is the mother
of her mother, here is a picture of the family forehead,
which wrinkled and creased like the forehead of Literature,
here is the author trapped in a classroom, with her grammar
open in front of her face. Here is the author"s pet wasp,

who had a straight line for a stinger, who perched on her finger
as she wrote; here is a picture of her bedroom wall,
where she made
a slash mark every day, and because she was religious,
a diagonal
slash on Sundays. Here is the author in her kitchen, grinding
whole punctuation into little pepper. Here is the author

in her garden, laying fat fig.s out to dry, and here is the author"s
backyard, where the alphabet grew straight up until an animal
came along, and she learned to read the bent-down grass; here
is a picture of her favorite tree, full of a single
black-and-white fruit,
and here is a picture of black-and-white juice smeared
on her smiling
chin. Lightning flashed and the favorite tree

fell open to the death scene, and she took an axe and hacked
until she had a sticky door, and she hung it by two hinges
and it yielded every year. Here is a picture of her writing desk,
which had an elbow for her elbow, and here is a picture
of her pencil cup, that she sometimes tried to drink from —
believing herself to be lost in the desert — and here is a page
of notes that reads:
Fig. 1

Is a picture of the author in profile, writing a desert
through her window. She stares at the sand and prays
for no rain, since too much rain makes the fig.
split. Lines ray away from the author, they
are labeled A B C. Now she walks into her garden
and bends
down the grass, now she lets the grass trail off and she lets
the sand begin, now she steps and leaves fresh tracks,
in the hope that a following animal
believes fresh tracks
to be fig.s, in the hope that a following animal will eat
and excrete them somewhere else. She begins to suffer
from exposure. What will I drink? she wonders,
and a cactus
stands up against the sky, and what will I eat, she wonders,

and the fruit of a succulent is straight lines,
and her pet wasp lands on her longest finger
and sees the end coming
and stings her with it.