My husband storms angrily into the kitchen and tells me
he’s had another nightmare that I’ve been writing poetry,
that I was sending off stacks and stacks of envelopes,
spending excessive amounts on postage and mailing supplies
to pursue my worthless ambitions. “You seem to think
you’re going to live forever,” he tells me at the end of his story,
“that you can keep taking these little steps towards nothing
while people out there are working themselves to death.
It seems like a smart person would have figured things out,
given up by now.” But I’m still stuck on this nightmare he’s had
of me writing poetry—and not of me
stabbing him in his sleep, or running away with another man,
or forgetting to feed or even completely abandoning our children,
all things my subconscious has terrified me with,
all the things that send me running to my desk in the middle of the night
to exorcise with poetry, this terrible thing I do.
