"When You Read My Poem.... "

When you read my poem, let the words be like the flashes of light you love, and are just as brief as the light they cast. Read my verse rhythms as if they were parallel to the warm breezes that caress your flesh in their passage. And if a phrase strikes you as especially truthful or an image as especially lovely, pause your reading so that it can sink into your heart... What are these words but air breathed in and out, with their sounds carrying into the world this stumbling eloquence, which arrives as poetry, goes deep within your being, and disappears...