Why Read Poems?

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