Writing from the Tundra

I hate being a woman asleep

inside a man’s body;

at my window desk, in my Italian notebook,

I describe the concrete fields beyond my home,

smoke stacks lit up against a pink sky;

I feel most visible, flipping through the pages

of my work, seeing myself flicker in my words.

Unable to stop writhing, as if a fish hook

snagged my gills,

the line caught up in them,

the academic in me cannot tease it out;

writing about another poet, she becomes me,

a narcissism I hate.

Snow builds to the window each day.

And I feel myself breaking up into the wind.

My students know it. I discuss it with them,

this routine of meeting twice each week;

I tell them that I have given all I have to give.

Into the evening, pollutants disperse

from factories. A train makes a sharp,

austere sound,

as if shot, trying to escape.