Here are the first stanzas. (You can find the whole poem here.)

By the time I get myself out of bed, my wife has left
the house to take her botany final and the painter
has arrived in his van and is already painting
the columns of the front porch white and the decking gray.

It is early June, a breezy and sun-riddled Tuesday
that would quickly be forgotten were it not for my
writing these few things down as I sit here empty-headed
at the typewriter with a cup of coffee, light and sweet.

I feel like the secretary to the morning whose only
responsibility is to take down its bright, airy dictation
until it’s time to go to lunch with the other girls,
all of us ordering the cottage cheese with half a pear.

This is what stenographers do in courtrooms, too,
alert at their miniature machines taking down every word.
When there is a silence they sit still as I do, waiting
and listening, fingers resting lightly on the keys.

 

If I look up, I see out the window the white stars

of clematis climbing a ladder of strings, a woodpile,

a stack of faded bricks, a small green garden of herbs,

things you would expect to find outside a window,

 

all written down now and placed in the setting

of a stanza as unalterably as they are seated

in their chairs in the ontological rooms of the world,

Yes, this is the kind of job I could succeed in,

 

an unpaid but contented amanuensis whose hands

are two birds fluttering on the lettered keys,

whose eyes see sunlight splashing through the leaves,

and the bright pink asterisks of honeysuckle

 

and the piano at the other end of this room with

its small vase of faded flowers and its empty bench.

Reading tips:

1. Observe the stanza breaks and the punctuation as you read aloud.

2. Feel the compositionally-determined rhythms, the sounds of consonants and vowels, the alliterations, the word repetition.

3. Visualize and fill out for yourself the images she places so seemingly effortlessly.

4. Perceive it as a monologue. (Which should be understood to mean: a dialogue with just one speaker.)

5. Feel the overall atmosphere. Feels the shifts in supplementary atmospheres.

6. Who is the protagonist? To whom is she speaking? Where is she coming from? What does she want?

7. Explore (what does it mean to explore?) the poem with your tongue, your lips, your teeth, your whole body; with your imagination and whole inner life.

8. Play (what does it mean to play?) as you read silently and speak it aloud.

To be continued.