Inside Out

By Diane Wakoski b. 1937 Diane Wakoski

I walk the purple carpet into your eye

carrying the silver butter server

but a truck rumbles by,

leaving its black tire prints on my foot

and old images the sound of banging screen doors on hot

afternoons and a fly buzzing over the Kool-Aid spilled on

the sink

flicker, as reflections on the metal surface.

Come in, you said,

inside your paintings, inside the blood factory, inside the

old songs that line your hands, inside

eyes that change like a snowflake every second,

inside spinach leaves holding that one piece of gravel,

inside the whiskers of a cat,

inside your old hat, and most of all inside your mouth where you

grind the pigments with your teeth, painting

with a broken bottle on the floor, and painting

with an ostrich feather on the moon that rolls out of my mouth.

You cannot let me walk inside you too long inside

the veins where my small feet touch

bottom.

You must reach inside and pull me

like a silver bullet

from your arm.

Diane Wakoski, “Inside Out” from Emerald Ice: Selected Poems 1962-1987. Copyright © 1988 by Diane Wakoski. Reprinted with the permission of David
R. Godine/Black Sparrow Press, www.blacksparrowbooks.com/titles/wakoski.htm.

Source: Emerald Ice: Selected Poems 1962-1987 (1988)

Biography

Diane Wakoski, described as an "important and moving poet" by Paul Zweig in the New York Times Book Review, is frequently named among the foremost contemporary American poets by virtue of her experiential vision and her unique voice. Wakoski's poems focus on intensely personal experiences—on her unhappy childhood, on the painful relationships she has had with men and, perhaps most frequently, on the subject of being Diane . . .

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