Poets have been calling on the Muse for thousands of years, usually in a tone of awe. Here the speaker sounds more like someone phoning a difficult relative before a visit: please come, but behave. The title promises an invocation to her "actual" muse, which suggests the real one, not the glamorous creature of tradition. This one shows up in gray, sighing, and carrying a bag full of the speaker's own past.
That bag is the poem's cleverest invention. In the first stanza the muse is told not to bring "newspaper clippings from high school days," the mother's letters from college, "the piles of reminders of the failures / of my unsettled past." The muse here is less a source of fresh ideas than an archivist of memory and regret, and she wants to rummage through journals, photo albums, closets and "dreams." The modern clutter that slips in alongside these, "the check book, the credit card slips, the Status Updates," is funny, and it makes the inspection feel uncomfortably current. The line "none of your business" lands like a slammed drawer.
Notice, though, that the speaker has already let the muse in. The banned items are listed so vividly that the poem is built from the very material it claims to keep private. The request to stay out of her past is itself a piece of writing that draws on it. Judging by this, the "actual" muse may be the speaker's own memory, or her habit of self-criticism, and she can't be locked out so easily. She can only be asked to be kind "just for today."
The opening line stumbles in a way that matches this nervousness: "Come visit, me, you." The odd commas separate "me" from "you," as if the two figures were standing awkwardly apart, and the word order wobbles before the speaker steadies into plain, bossy speech. The poem is in free verse, with no rhyme scheme and a conversational rhythm made of short commands. Its energy comes from the verbs. In the second stanza the muse is told not to "slog," not to "fold" her hands, not to "sigh," but to come "skipping" and to "snap" her fingers and "ring some bells." The heavy verbs belong to the muse as she is, and the quick ones to the muse the speaker wants. The questions at the end of that stanza ("Don't you have any clothes that aren't gray? / I've never heard you laugh") scold and plead at once. The speaker is also admitting how long she has lived with this solemn companion.
The shape of the poem tracks its change of mood. The stanzas shrink from eleven lines to nine to six, and the "Don't" commands give way to a run of "Come" lines. The last stanza abandons prohibition altogether and offers a picture: coffee, "homemade buttered bread," fiddle and flute, "orange tulips." Against the gray of the second stanza, these bring in color and sound, and the sounds themselves turn lively, with the b's of "bread," "bouquet" and "basket" and the paired instruments "fiddle and flute." The inspiration being summoned is domestic, edible and warm.
The final image answers the first. In stanza one the muse lugs a bag, which is full and heavy. In the last lines she is asked to come "with an empty basket / like the one I carry to the market / to fill with fresh green things." The emptiness is the point. Instead of unloading the past, the muse is asked to travel light and be open to whatever comes. The speaker also places herself beside the muse, carrying the same kind of basket, so the two become fellow shoppers, not inspector and suspect. The repeated "fresh" and the ending on the simple word "things" leave the poem unfinished, like a market trip just beginning. The numbering in "April #1" hints at a series, though that is only an inference from the title.
What makes the poem worth reading is how it makes a very old convention humble and human. It admits that creative work is often burdened by memory and self-doubt, and it proposes no grand cure, only a day's truce and some good bread. The hope it offers is small and believable, and the humor keeps it from becoming sentimental.