He reads my latest attempt at a poem <br />and is silent for a long time, until it feels <br />like that night we waited for Apollo, <br />my mother wandering in and out of her bedroom, asking, <br />Haven't they landed yet? At last <br />Dugan throws it on the table and says, <br />This reads like a cheap detective novel <br />and I've got nothing to say about it. It sits, <br />naked and white, with everyone's eyes <br />running over it. The week before <br />he'd said I had a problem with time, <br />that in my poems everything <br />kept happening at once. In 1969, <br />the voice of Mission Control <br />told a man named Buzz <br />that there was a bunch of guys turning blue <br />down here on Earth, and now I can understand <br />it was with anticipation, not sickness. Next, <br />Dugan says, Let's move on. The attempted poem <br />was about butterflies and my recurring desire <br />to return to a place I've never been. <br />It was inspired by reading this <br />in a National Geographic: monarchs <br />stream northward from winter roosts in Mexico, <br />laying their eggs atop milkweed <br />to foster new generations along the way. <br />With the old monarchs gone (I took this line as the title) <br />and all ties to the past ostensibly cut <br />the unimaginable happens--butterflies <br />that have never been to that plateau in Mexico <br />roost there the next winter. . . .I saw this <br />as a metaphor for a childhood I never had, <br />until Dugan pointed out <br />that metaphor has been dead for a hundred years. <br />A woman, new to the workshop, leans <br />behind his back and whispers, I like it, <br />but the silence is seamless, as deep <br />as outer space. That night in 1969 <br />I could turn my head from the television and see <br /> the moon <br />filling the one pane over the bed completely <br />as we waited for Neil Armstrong <br />to leave his footprints all over it.<br /><br />Nick Flynn<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/alan-dugan-telling-me-i-have-a-problem-with-time/
