Tom Wayman: What Good Poems Are For

To sit on a shelf in the cabin across the lake
where the young man and the young woman
have come to live—there are only a few books
in this dwelling, and one of them
is this book of poems.
To be like plants
on a sunlit windowsill
of a city apartment—all the hours of care
that go into them, the tending and watering,
and yet to the casual eye they are just present
—a brief moment of enjoyment.
Only those who work on the plant know how
slowly it grows
and changes, almost dies from its own causes
or neglect, or how other plants
can be started from this one
and used elsewhere in the house
or given to friends.
But everyone notices the absence of plants
in a residence
even those who don’t have plants themselves.

There is also (though this is more rare)
Bob Smith’s story about the man in the bar up north,
a man in his 50’s taking a poem from a new book Bob
showed him
around from table to table, reading it aloud
to each group of drinkers because, he kept saying,
the poem was about work he did, what he knew about,
written by somebody like himself.
But where could he take it
except from table to table, past the Fuck offs
and the Hey, that’s pretty goods? Over the noise
of the jukebox and the bar’s TV,
past the silence of the lake,
a person is speaking
in a world full of people talking.
Out of all that is said, these particular words
put down roots in someone’s mind
so that he or she likes to have them here—
these words no one was paid to write
that live with us for a while
in a small container
on the ledge where the light enters.