Annotate Collins 1988 poem and Sexton's Said the Poet to the Analyist
My business is words. Words are like labels, / or coins, or better, like swarming bees. / I confess I am only broken by the sources of things; / as if words were counted like dead bees in the attic, / unbuckled from their yellow eyes and their dry wings. / I must always forget how one word is able to pick / out another, to manner another, until I have got / something I might have said… / but did not. / Your business is watching my words. But I / admit nothing. I work with my best, for instance, / when I can write my praise for a nickel machine, / that one night in Nevada: telling how the magic jackpot / came clacking three bells out, over the lucky screen. / But if you should say this is something it is not,/ then I grow weak, remembering how my hands felt funny / and ridiculous and crowded with all / the believing money.
