All my assigned readings
are about epiphanies.
I send myself and my writing students
on walks, telling them to track one color,
then “write the poem that follows.”
I collect green: a gardening hose,
Rutland Road, an Astroturf lawn
in Ditmas Park. I return
to this lawn at night
to greet the lawn ornaments;
a plastic reindeer in its harness
a plastic dog with an open mouth.
Two students submit poems
with puzzling choices:
all rhyming quatrains
about the “city’s heart,”
the “city’s pulse,” the “city’s
relentless beat.” Who rhymes?
I work backwards,
asking a chatbot
for creative labor: Please
write me a poem about color?
There is pleasure in pure clarity,
I think, as the bot gifts me
the same rhymed quatrains
on “the city’s pulse”
—pleasure in the seasick dread
of ants streaming
into shape. Green shit
of ducks. Green fake marble inlay.
The moment, after the end of it,
I understood he had been ending it
with me for a long time. I held on to that clarity
for weeks; the calm feeling
of having worked something out.