I am giving a lecture on poetry
to the painters who creak like saddles
in their black leather jackets in the studio,
where a fire is burning like a painting of
a fire; I am explaining my current work
on the erotics of narrative. It is night.
Overhead the moon’s naked heel dents
the sky, the crickets ignite themselves
into a snore, and the painters yawn
lavishly waiting for me to say Something
About Painting, the way your dog, when
you are talking, listens for the words Good Dog.

“Your indifference draws me like horses draw flies,”
I say while noticing in the window the peonies
throbbing with pulses, the cindery crows seething
over the lawn. “Nevertheless,” I continue, “I call
your attention to the fact that, in this poem, what was
once just a pronoun is now a pronoun talking about
a peony while you sit in a room somewhere unmoved
by this. And that’s okay. Gertrude Stein said America
was a space filled with moving, but I hate being moving.
If you want to feel go to the movies, because poetry
has no intention of being moving; it is perhaps one
of the few things left in America that is not moving.

And yet, I am a fatalist when it comes to art
in English, because in English
even a simile is a story and there is no trip
so predictable that some poem won’t take it.”
And just as I am finishing my lecture, here
is the snowy hem of the end of the page
and one of the painters says to me, “Actually,
I found that very moving. Get in the car.
I’ll drive you home.”