This week’s poem shows us what the speaker (and perhaps the writer) thinks about the art of poetry through example and implication. The person telling us about her brother’s careful paper airplanes and her mother’s embroidery learned to watch and admire what she cannot do – and to tell about it.

Sally Bliumis-Dunn teaches at Manhattanville College and splits her time between New York and Harpswell. Her third book, “Echolocation,” was published by Plume Editions/MadHat Press in 2018.

Ars Poetica

By Sally Bliumis-Dunn

At the kitchen table my brother

would crisp the folded lines, taper them

to a point at the airplane’s tip.

 

The careful square flaps he knew

to tear on each side of the tail

allowed the plane’s sudden dip

 

and slow flat sail to a flawless

landing on our red linoleum floor.

Though he tried to teach me,

 

mine flew poorly,

so I learned to sit and watch

 

as now I watch these arctic terns,

perfect paper planes,

falling from the sky, aimed

 

at floating crabs, with the precision

of mother’s embroidery needle

piercing the cloth—

 

another quiet task

I could never master.

 

 

Gibson Fay-LeBlanc is a poet who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Poem copyright © 2018 Sally Bliumis-Dunn. It appears in Echolocation (Plume Editions/MadHat Press, 2018), and appears here by permission of the author. For an archive of all the poems that have appeared in this column, go to www.pressherald.com/tag/deep-water.