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In a Bar (At the celebration of Emily Dickinson’s 177th Birthday)
You are reading intensely, underscoring
the key words, that one verb
you hunted half the night for, looking up
at the West Texas stars, when
a woman walks through your poem.
Glittery red sweater, high-heeled boots,
she stalks negligently across the floor,
shows us her sleek denim butt
as she clacks over the wooden boards,
up the ramp and out into the back.
 You slow down your reading, miss
a comma, then pick it up again
and continue. But the poem’s changed.
Now it has her footsteps in it.
You will always slow at just that point
in vague puzzlement, hearing them,
and when it comes out in
Chelsea Review
readers will look at it twice, say,
it’s all about
a West Texas landscape
but there seems to be a woman in it.
Janet McCann
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