How to be Creative (again)

Things I don't say to the woman beside me
in the bookstore reading How to be Creative
(If You Thought You Never Could)

Be careful. A joy but not
a comfort. If you sew
you will wear needles, know
too much of seams. For the appliqu�
of family tree impossibly
both fruit and blossom,
you'll pull root threads
from the mouths of the dead.
If you write, you'll know
that each thing written
pares the skin, the top
of the mind's palimpsest, the tip
of the tongue. There's a rawness
to it, a tooth hole you can't help
tasting, tasting. Look -- that woman
with the paper skin and drawn-in
eyebrows: your eyes
are needles, and make their biopsy.
Or, see -- that girl child too old
for her undressed doll, how
she bats its lashed eyes,
how tenderly her father
clings -- Scrapbooking,
you're reading now, How to Catch
a Memory. Wait. Once you wake,
you wake to everything.
It is an eye stitched open.