Something's in the water

Here's a rough second draft of a poem that began with a mimic of Naomi Shihab Nye's "What People Do" (great poem, incidentally). The one bad thing about this exercise is, if you use amazing poetry/poets as a base, everything kind of pales in comparison. But, without further scraping and excusing:

Outside/Inside

Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday the days press together,
strange bundled passengers at a bus stop.
I am in the streets, one of those days’ evenings haven fallen upon me,

(How did I arrive here?
I ask myself this each day)

and I pick up the paper,
its damp wings and words fluttering outside the door.
I take it to my lover
who sits two stories up, impassive
in the bottom of the warm well of our bedroom.

(Today my face is glass.
I walk the streets reflecting all I can with it
as the rain pats the ground)

He is there waiting for the night to fall, the day to become the next.
I give him the paper. He puts it in the litterbox.
Its wings wilt under the spread of sand.



I would tell my lover
Today I understand.
I am a bird and you are a stone.

Instead I stand here next to him
handing dishes to be dried,
watching him wipe each one carelessly
with a damp towel,
the one which smells of the tissues in my mother’s pocket,
of cloudcover in March.

(My face is glass)