– 29 –

Reading a collection of poems marked by a previous reader

Angrily I take out the soft honey-coloured rubber
and leave crumbs on the pages where
rhymes are circled and margin comments
and, once, an inferior, imitating poem.

Who has needed to explain these poems
with underlinings? Not Mary Oliver^*
who wrote them, taking into account
the spaces and the space around the spaces.