Vaguely about very little...

This thesis is more and more convincing: the mesh of poetry a net around us like unseen strings of moon threading through water. More convincing--I notice it this way: first, you realize when you stopped the car you sat for a moment and just sort of hefted the moment and guaged it's weight in an empty sort of way. Well, that was me, maybe you don't like to sit around like a fool, but tell me there doesn't come a time when you realize that some tide is creeping up your bank of sand. I'm not saying you live on that shore--that would be mad. But you've found yourself there maybe.

Ok, that's part one, just being there and knowing it, like some half-way sort of longing, like edging up to something empty that has the feel of full, or maybe the other way around. Now, part two is you read a bunch of mediocre--I'm saying decent, I don't want you to waste your time, but it can't be Yeats or Shakespeare or Wright or something--poetry. If you do this for like a week, you kind of get all juiced up with this stuff. Now, next time you come around to this sort of moment I'm describing, it should click--if it doesn't, then you need to hit the books again, I think.

And it clicks: all this poetic diction and sentiment like a skimming skin coming in on that tide. It might be all brilliant and foamy, or it might be green and smell of fish, but it should be there. And you realize what it is you're reaching out for--some kind of narrative, but not really a story, just a way to sort of grab hold of that empty thing and make it do something, blow it full of air like a brown paper lunch bag in a middle school lunchroom, or just to say, here, if I weren't just me right here in my driveway, but if instead some cosmic thing were happening, this is what it might be. See, that's why you can't be reading brilliant stuff beforehand--I mean, we all know that isn't our story.

But there is some story, some song of ourselves, yes, that we hear piping along now and then? I think this might be bad for us, actually. The poetry-of-doing-nothing-useful not the poetry that knows that words are made for action and action for interaction and story can come chasing like wave after crest. Self-reflection like silver fish should be scooped away in that lively mesh, and the sea can dance and sway in it's sweet and portly way without us. Like it has since before there was anything at all to say.