If I said I meant Easter eggs as in video games, would that make you want to read this?

I think the reason so many people don't like poetry is because it seems to take an awful lot of work to get to the bottom of a poem.  It's like digging for Easter eggs.  That's why I didn't really get into poetry until I discovered Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton.  They are two confessional poets, and that just made what they were writing so much more accessible.  Then there's Billy Collins.  Billy Collins was the Poet Laureate of the U.S. in 2001.  Poet Stephen Dunn once said about him, "He doesn't hide things from us, as I think lesser poets do. He allows us to overhear, clearly, what he himself has discovered."  I leave you the following poem, and you can see if you think that holds true:

Introduction to Poetry

-Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

You're apologizing to me?

Back in college I wrote a poem that included a line I thought was pretty great: "a stitch that itches the womb."  The poem itself wasn't anything special.  It was about humanity, which is basically the broadest topic you could pick to write about, and I only decided to do it because I saw a magazine in the supermarket that had a photo essay on fetuses.  I had to have an assignment to turn in the next day.  Boom.  Fetus poem.  I secretly loved that one line, though.

I was a little nervous when I had to read the poem out in class because I knew my theme was flimsy to say the least.  There's always that moment after you read something out loud where the whole room is silent, taking it in, and you wonder which way the audience is going to tip.  But it was that line, only that line, that saved me.  I got a lot of praise for it, with my professor specifically picking it out.  "A really nice use of internal rhyme," she said, "I love the way it plays on the tongue."

The trouble is, after I turned the poem in, I suddenly wondered, did I write that?  Was that my original line?  Could I really come up with something so neat?  Did I subconsciously plagiarize it? I was reading a lot of Plath and Sexton at the time.  It did sound distinctly Plath to me . . .

I didn't want to know.  If I wasn't capable of that level of grown-up writing, and if even my own brain was overcompensating, then I'd rather just leave well enough alone.  I avoided the Google search box.  I ignored the book Ariel sitting on my shelf.  There was one poem I suspected I borrowed from in that collection, and I didn't want to go near it.  So it went on for nine years until the day I recently lost my job.

Feeling sucker-punched and directionless, I was questioning my purpose once again.  It was a familiar place to be.  I decided that I'd had enough.  I had to know: did I write that damn line?  To the Google search box!  I typed in the quote.  Something came up.

What's this?  An apology?  Google actually apologized for not being able to come up with an exact match.  I could scarcely dare to believe it.  There was only one other way to be sure.  To the bookshelf!

I went into my bedroom and dusted old Ariel off the shelf.  Even so many years later I still knew exactly which page to go to.  From a poem called Lady Lazarus:  "And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls."

That's it?  That's it???  Granted, that's a beautiful line, but I didn't plagiarize!  The stitch that itches was mine.  My line.  I wrote it.  Now, I feel safe to say, here is the poem:

Anyone Could Join the Circus

The first month we look like worms,
eyes in a sac, a stitch that itches the womb.
We are bulbs of flesh, photographed
for Time magazine's latest fetus spread.
This is how millions
discovered just how close we'd come
to being left in a shape nowhere near human,
had the covers been suddenly yanked
off our cozy amniotic waterbeds.

At three months we have the snouts of pigs.
At eight we could be the progeny of a pachyderm.
What is to keep us from popping out
with a small, wrinkled trunk in those last
two months?  Maybe those who are allergic
to peanuts have been the humans all along . . .

Would my mother have loved a child
more elephant than not?