The poet must not use vetch, the nodding violet, natural gas, nor any special rock
form to launder her reputation.

She must be scrupulous. She must acknowledge that imposition
precedes composition.

She must scrub her dirty thoughts from the landscape, which is her body,
winnowed and taut as bleached heather.

And in doing so, she must guard against the applause of her leaking blemish.

Not for her the glittering azure, the pillar of gnats, the self-like veil of moss.

Not for her the genius loci or regrettable crow.

She must not mistake that reeling around the high pines, the path studded with gauzy
rhododendrons and the wind stamping her throat like a lover, for her own sentiment,
however diaphanous, or narratively climaxed.

If she changes her life after the fact, it is incidental.

For when she next seeks the willow’s counsel, steeped in the crisis of herself,
she retraces her steps only to find, in place of the windswept path, the pink thoughts,
the pollen clouds of enlightenment –
relief from significance.

That the shaded path is the bowel of the world, and she an impersonal wrongness,
merely passing through its muddy little bends.