Every poem <br />begins with a single <br />word, and usually <br />one I know. So far, <br />so good. Ready <br /> <br />to proceed. The next word <br />may shoot straight to a verb — <br />I smile, to know already who is doing what — <br />or it may go up a winding <br />road of phrases leading to <br />a tangled growth of clauses, <br /> <br />verb buried somewhere there, <br />unless it's a ghost, merely looking <br /><i>down</i> upon the poem. <br /> <br />Half my happiness <br />is knowing where I am. <br />Reading, I slowly build <br />a structure in my mind, <br /> <br />though sometimes the last stanza <br />of a perfect poem-house <br />turns out to be — a can-opener, <i>the square <br />root of two, a law of thermodynamics</i>, <br />anything but the closure I'd awaited, <br />and cold winds still <br />blow through the finished poem. <br /> <br />I try to bore through <br />blizzards of poems <br />like the railroad's <br />snow-blower car. <br /> <br />I like a sense of humor in a poem <br />even when not getting the joke, <br />for then I feel I've entered <br />something porous, loose, unlike <br /> <br />the long, surrealistic treatises <br />that wail like the siren <br />of an ambulance <br />heading to Bellevue, <br /> <br />or the strait-jacketed, <br />solemn pronouncements <br />of academic poems. <br /> <br />Why do I go on reading? <br />Because life on the street <br />doesn't often look at me <br />and speak my name, or smile. <br /> <br />What else is there, <br />but to go on poring through <br />anthologies of poems, <br />anthologies of sunbeams <br />anthologies of leaves of trees, <br />to find something speaking back <br />from the heart of <br />the mystery we are.<br /><br />Max Reif<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/why-read-poems/
