What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In our third series, The Poems of Others II, we have reimagined our inaugural series, asking our editors to invite others to pay homage to the poems that led them to write. Each Monday's delivery brings you the poem and an excerpt from the essay.  
It is almost polio season. The girls

From the cigarette factories in Massachusetts
Are still visiting the northern beaches.
At midnight, the milky rubbers
In the breakers are like a familiar invasion

Of sea life.
Sitting on the rocks we watch a runner:
Weight shifted, some tick, tick,
Almost of intelligence—
The bone catching of balance. . .

From behind, a red-haired girl appears—
Missing a thumb on her left hand,
Breathless, she asks for a light:
A crumpled pack of Lucky Strikes
At the top of a nylon stocking;
The other leg bare, her abdomen
And breasts plastered with white sand.
Drunk, she says, "He just swam out
Past the jetty—that was twenty minutes
Ago. You think I give a damn?"

We lit the cigarette for her. Her hands
Shaking.

No moon, it took an hour
To find all her clothing,
Dropped as they ran
Down the rock shelf through dunes. . .

He hadn't drowned. He swam around the jetty,
Crawled to the grasses and over the granite shelf.
Gathering his clothes, he left
Her there as a joke.

Her hair was colored
That second chaste coat of red on the pomegranate.
We were eating sandwiches on the rocks.
She frightened my mother and me. My little
Sister just thought she was funny.
In thirty years I have dreamt of her twice, once
With fear and once without. I've written
This for her, and because

Twice is too often
Considering how beautiful she was.
from the book THE MERCY SEAT / Copper Canyon Press
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"The ars poetica is a poem that takes the art of poetry as its subject matter. The tradition can be traced back to the Roman lyric poet Horace (ca. 19 B.C.E.) and his poem titled 'Ars Poetica,' in which he argues that poetry should be both amusing and instructive. Modern and contemporary poets have approached the genre in a myriad of ways over the years, employing it, for example, to construct broad defenses of poetry, or to make arguments for particular kinds of poetics, or as a space to meditate on or define their own aesthetics."
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