Splinter
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I like you, a twenty-year-old poet writes to me.
A beginning carpenter of words.
His letter smells of lumber.
His muse still sleeps in rosewood.
Ambitious noise in a literary sawmill.
Apprentices veneering a gullible tongue.
They cut to size the shy plywood of sentences.
A haiku whittled with a plane.
Problems begin
with a splinter lodged in memory.
It is hard to remove
much harder to describe.
Wood shavings fly. The apple cores of angels.
Dust up to the heavens.
by Ewa Lipska
translation by Robin Davidson & Ewa Elżbieta Nowakowska
from The New Century
Northwestern University Press, 2009