A Poem by Stephen Burt

A Poem by Stephen Burt

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

Esprit Stephanie

The hard work of appearances disappears
into the apparent effortlessness, and the loose three-quarter sleeves

of trying to become what other
people, your friends, your real friends, are convinced that you already are,

like trying to follow the pale fleck of a small plane,
or a big plane far away.

Sweatshirts big enough to hide half a person
hide behind their modular words,

and leggings. Where two or three strangers gather
together, sandbar: we are migratory birds,

temporarily almost aloft, almost fluorescent, in a 1983
of lemon-yellow possibilities,

things I might very insistently wish to be.
Only an eyelash separates me from reason,

from the coveted role of pretty-to-geeky liaison.
To be good, to be

a good girl, is to pile up
credit you have to use up

before nobody else remembers you earned it.
There was a lesson in variability here, and in the history

of stencils, but I am not the girl who learned it.
When I got here first I looked around, and around.

I would like to compare my own growing up
to sand, and you and you to solid ground.

Stephen Burt is Professor of English at Harvard and the author of The Art of the Sonnet (2010, with David Mikics), Belmont (2013), and the chapbook All-Season Stephanie (out now).

You will find more poems here. You may contact the editor at [email protected].