Getting It Right

           by Susan Stevens
		
	She was so earnest, and so moonstruck:
	What stalled in her mind as she roamed streets
	with such resolve that I believed her motion had meaning?
	Letting her lucid times construe all the rest,
	I would bring sense to her forgetting one instant 
	in the next.

	The grief of this lie is as heavy as hearing you
	read in verse about the connectedness of all things,
	how everything relates—demonically, almost.
	
	The trouble this gives you
	sets up networks of memory in me,
	connections, remembering one who has lost
	her power to hook up to anything for very long.
	
	The staccato of your words comes at me like shrapnel;
	leaving the room as you read is like refusing to cry.
	Again I think of a woman whose steel-trap mind for precepts
	misses daily connections. Yet for you, dear careful poet,
	the sense lies in unfastening; the way your poem makes it clear
	ought to guarantee a perfect working of things
	if only the right person were to listen.