The poet is like a toy car factory
where half the models are broken
and the other half are racing in circles
out of control.
But when when one really runs,
boy, oh boy!
It’s a feeling like the Grand Prix
(of little tiny cars), the stickiness
of a tiny wheel, the little frame
that makes up the chassis,
snug hoods that don’t pop.
They’re not real, poems.
Their custodian, the one who frees them
from the box, possibly she is the muse herself.
They come racing out down an orange chute,
the boys waiting for the red ones, always the red ones
and so all the blue and yellow ones and the green ones
go plowing into the parking lots and into the fists
of quieter boys or louder girls. Yes, always the red ones
because that’s the vehicle to take them
where they want to go, just like a wheelbarrow
upon which so much depends.
But if you stand up for a minute you can see it:
the whole track of the world.
It’s all the cars and every car,
the walls and the factory doors and the sun
setting on the western wall
like Humpty Dumpty,
why the factory was ever built in the first place.
The parts stacked up right here or over there,
the car’s heart. the tenor or the mileage
of the vehicle or even the sum of the parts,
all the colorful little cars, hundreds of them.
It’s the whole thing.
The whole thing.