Natalie Shapero

Blue Note (Also “Worried” Note)

An inlet. I am the narrow metal
boat and also the boatman. I know
of two options only: tether myself

somehow to the sour
cleat of this earth, or drift.

But I never learned the knots.

I don’t know the buntline
hitch or clove hitch, don’t know how

to bend the heaving line.
I wake on the floor like a boat run up

on the shallows. Once I dreamed
of a boatman with snub-nosed gun
robbing me in my own home.

EACH PERSON IN YOUR DREAM
IS A VERSION OF YOU.

He said he wasn’t afraid to use it,
watched the window. He took everything.




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Natalie Shapero is the Professor of the Practice of Poetry at Tufts University and an editor at large of the Kenyon Review; her second collection of poems, Hard Child, will be published in the spring.