A Cowering Animal Woven Real

How would Ashbery or Hejinian
Have confessed a crime in a poem,
Assuming they had to confess?

How would Anne Carson have shifted
The phrases and gaps? Others, you would
Know how they’d do it, just not if they could.

To stick to the parochial theme
Of recent American poets, could Billy Collins
Or Mary Oliver have deliberately confessed?

Poets don’t confess their own sins,
As a rule, although Sharon Olds came
Close. What other people did to them

And theirs, what people unlike them did
To people like them, there’s a lot of that.
And of course, shame. Shame is confessed,

Often with a bit of chin-jutting defiance
Or rebellious anger in it, but
The best confessions in poems are accidents,

That don’t come out as confessions until later,
When mores and values have changed enough
That their very phrases are the sins. That’s the best.