At the Poem’s Insistence

Milton Jordan

May 17, 2022

Are you going to claim I am your poem,

your words scattered and sown with meaning

but little else until I plowed your line,

reset the fence posts of your margin 

and the standard to fly your flag ?

Did you imagine the color, rust reds

among the dusted bronze on autumn’s trees

along the near dry riverbed and distant

sounds of oversized truck tires on asphalt?

Are these your young boys on bicycles

followed by three rangy liver and white hounds

down the grit and gravel road celebrating

another afternoon free of their schoolroom?

Who are you to claim I am your poem?

Milton Jordan lives in Georgetown with the musician Anne Elton Jordan. His most recent poetry collection is What the Rivers Gather, SFASU Press, 2020. Milton edited the anthology, No Season for Silence: Texas Poets and Pandemic, Kallisto Gaia Press, 2020.