The Poem

In the apparent vacancy beyond each line, you might sense the poem waiting to think itself. Imagine the surface of a twilight pond in wind, shifting and changing the sky, then going still as a concentrating mind, the far trees deepening in its reflection. Like the poem the pond’s alive— its beauty (the sudden scintillation of a hundred thousand wavelets) and music (the percussion of a beaver’s tail) arising from what is. And when the pond accumulates the darkness, which it loves, it challenges your eyes to find the light that without darkness you could not see. Wild campsites you never noticed now appear along the far shore. It’s not only itself the poem waits for moving line by line into its own dark. It waits for you.