Paramount Stone
The weeds cannot tell me anything new.
I let them cover up the old lies
And the shapes are something
I could not have told myself
About how I grew over the person
I told people I was and became something
*
[Dear readers, While I deal with a little writer’s cramp of the soul, I thought I would share with you some poems from my book Vanishing Tracks, which was published in 2011. The poems I share this week are from a section called “Markers: Notes on a train trip from Virginia to Cape Cod and back again” and all the poems in that section were written, at least in draft form, on the train there or back again. Many of these poems deal in some way or another with memory, with looking back while bring propelled forward, even if the propulsion is, in the strange ways of geography and family, toward the past. I’m purposefully releasing only a selection of them, and out of order, at that, if only because I’m going to let the mood of each day determine what to reach back for.]
Translations from the English 
Whenever I pull out a weed I try to plant something in its place to cover up the bare patch, to give the weed competition in case it wants to regrow and to transform the area to how I want it to be, OK; I know it’s a metaphor: I’m just being the gardener that I am this morning rather than the poet I’d like to be. It ‘s too hard to be a poet full time.
I sure know that, Mary.