Weekly Poem: ‘Not a Verbal Equivalent’

By Dara Wier

You said one thing as a way of not saying something else.
You wrote something so that other things wouldn’t be written.
You drew me a picture of one thing and not anything else.
I’m trying to figure out how this applies to what you’ve gone
And done in case, by doing so, a solution to the problem we’ve been
Having no success solving makes itself evident. For the sake of
Argument, let’s say I’m a crime and you’re a clue and someone
Else, we don’t know who, is the detective. We’re on the Wind
River and it’s twilight and you have on your windbreaker of many
Pockets and I have on my boots in which I hide whatever needs
To be hidden. To be perfectly accurate you are barefoot and I
Have nothing to hide at the moment. Wild geese. Two butterflies
Of black and blue geometry. A coal train. Skid marks on the
Curve in the road that will point us slowly into a nearby cave.

Dara Wier is the author of 10 collections of poetry, including “You Good Thing” (Wave Books, 2013), “Remnants of Hannah” (Wave Books, 2006) and “Reverse Rapture” (Verse Press, 2005). She is on the permanent faculty in the MFA program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.