First Date
6/30/2008
Kenneth Burchfiel
I approach her before slinking away.
It just doesn’t feel right.
The meter she moves with, the stanzas she dresses in; who am I to be with her?
Who am I to enter her world?
But she reaches out an arm, draws me closer to the monitor, plants my fingers on the keyboard.
I shouldn’t be here, I think. It doesn’t feel right cutting a sentence
In half and ripping out the commas.
She urges me to type and I give in, banging homesick fingers on the keyboard.
No, she says—less structure.
less form. more freedom.
I resist. It’s adulterous just to think of exchanging my paragraph and indents for rhyme and rhythm. One never breaks a marriage with pro—
Oh, but she looks so slender on
that page. Sounds so
enticing
when read aloud.
So I begin a
dance with her, trying to mimic her
footsteps that seem so
natural when you read them off a page.
She calls my prose prosaic—
says rhyme scheme is the rage.
I stumble along
with fingers too bulky to mimic
the rhythmic flowing of her ways.
Yet she smiles anyway
at the progress I’ve made,
Says she’d love
to have me
dance
another day.
So began my scandalous affair
with Poetry.
