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I have been eating poetry

Wildly gorging on it,
like it was chocolate, and you know—

I cannot keep candy in the house.
I’d be fat as a tick, as Mama used to say.

Poetry is calorie-free, sweeter than syrup
but sometimes so bitter it stings going down.

I sat alone in a softly-lit hushed restaurant last
Saturday night, reading poetry, poetry, poetry

and savoring vegetarian chili, roast carrots and
a cold brown ale.

There is no happiness like mine:
so much poetry—no room, even, for dessert.

(An ode to Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mark Strand, who died this week.)