Poetry is Sense, Sensed


The fox in the field is a standing wave,
a graph of attention.
Then he breaks for cover. The wave snaps flat
into red direction.

~

A dancer is the patron saint of trust.
The poet is a saint of hesitation.

~

Even the spidery bare
branches I want to call tangled are tangled
only by distraction.
Closer. They unclench.
Small unhurried rivulets of tree.

~

I work to be changed,
or someone like an I,
though hardly enough to interrupt a mirror.

~

Can't leave them
where they lie: shells and stones
on the beach, their pearl and uranium light--

inert on the desk as any gravel, still,
touched in their shallow dish they're cold
as the unmade, fade
more slowly than roses.

~

The poet bends in language like
a rose in its bud vase,
green stroke of its stem alive and

broken at the water line,
shifted away from itself at the point
where water baffles the light.

~

And the moral of this book ,
my friend once said,
is 'don't kill yourself.'
The moral of most books, this one included,
is _Look what happens if you don't_.

~

Poets have voices the way mountains have hermits.

~

The adepts of experience
practice practice.

Remember the match that burns twice,
a child's courtship with pain,

the firewood that warms twice,
an adult's joke on effort.

~

I worked to be changed,
was changed into something
that no longer worked.

~


Poetry, for
solitude loves boundary.

Solitude, the word wrapped around its
contraband quiet.

~

For poetry is sense, sensed.
There is nothing to Ariadne but her thread.

~

A woman walks down a hall in her house:
a wall has disappeared, where yesterday
her photographs, diplomas,
portrait hung. What shall we call it,
this tunnel blind-sided by space, where she stands?

~~~
(c) Wendy Battin

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