How to Write a Poem by Michael Blumenthal

Forget, now, for a moment
that you were the blond boy
whose father jumped from the bridge
when you were only ten. Forget
that you are the broken-hearted,
the cuckolded, the windswept lover
alone beneath the dangling pines.
Forget that you are the girl
of the godless cry, that no one
took you into his hapless arms
during the cold night, that you have
cried from the fathomless depths
like a blue whale and the world
has called back to you only its oracles
of moonlight and relinquishment.
Forget, now, my young friends,
everything you can never forget,
and hear, in the untamed wind,
in the peroration of the ravishing ari,
the words for your life: omelette,
investiture, Prokofiev, stars.
Forget, even as you look up at them,
the astral bodies and the heavenly bodies,
forget, even, you own ravenous body
and call out, into the beckoning light,
the names of everything you have
never known: flesh and blood, stone
and interlude, marmalade and owl
those first syllables of your new world:
your clear and forgotten life.