note the syntax and nuance

the shady overtones

threatening to expose

your hiding places

 

take away anything that doesn’t bear critical weight.

 

strike the palms together and feel the beat

of letters shaping words, shaping musical notes

it’s not only what a word means

but what does it sound like?

 

consider this hyphen-

this em dash—

this comma,

the way                       white                          space

 

controls

 

time

and generates moments of                                      suspension

 

sometimes, images talked to death

the beady eye of a whale

the wheels of an old Chevy

water split open

 

wind your way,

toward a unified purpose

drift into a riff

but when a poem goes off tangent                                     so goes emotion

 

Ezra Pound said to go in fear of abstractions.

 

you can’t touch freedom

but you can touch a ripped American flag

and smell its bloody stripes

and hear a soldier weeping for his mother

 

“At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet,” said Neruda.

 

there is strength in not knowing

what the poem means

not pretending you understand

its source, its heat, its inherited tongue