What Only Poetry Can Do (baritone)

1. WHY WRITE?

Because I’m here, this late in the century,

looking at the ink-filled
sky,

seeing the April comet, a luminous exclamation,

not believing, with the alternatives

of nuclear char or unchecked epidemic,

that anything from our time will last.

But still, I was here, on this rock,

this shaley hillside, violets blooming

in the grass, for a short time. I suffered,

I lived, I loved in the face of everything,

and I have to write it down.

—Barbara Crooker

2. USED BOOK

What luck—an open bookstore up ahead

as rain lashed awnings over Royal Street,

and then to find the books were secondhand,

with one whole wall assigned to poetry;

and then, as if that wasn’t luck enough,

to find, between Jarrell and Weldon Kees,

the blue-on-cream, familiar backbone of

my chapbook, out of print since ’83—

its cover very slightly coffee-stained,

but aging (all in all) no worse than flesh

through all those cycles of the seasons since

its publication by a London press.

Then, out of luck, I read the name inside:

The man I thought would love me till I died.

—Julie Kane

3. REJECTION SLIP

forefinger sliced open

by rejection slip:

the cruelest cut of all

—Barbara Crooker

4. WHAT ONLY POETRY CAN DO

Make us stop, in our harried multi-tasking modern

(or post-modern) lives, away from the ambient light

of electricity and all that follows, and look up,

into the great glass eye of night, gazing in dumb

struck wonder at the coded messages of the stars.

—Barbara Crooker