​What Is Poetry? 


A backpack, a stuffed duffel, full 
of holey clothes and musty books. 
What you wish had happened, 
but even more, what you wish 
hadn't. Tangled tapes pulled 
from ancient cassettes: 
what your father said, dying 
and what your mother never stopped 
saying — your bad judgments, 
what you did to your hair, and 
how you let things go, let her down.
All the men you've bricked up 
in the basement, unmentionable.
Yet out of nowhere, a sudden 
sweetness of moist earth and rot. 
It's the space between coming 
and going, a place to wander, 
to launch yourself into or escape from, 
dragging your clanking bag of sins 
from one terminal to another 
through one more security check 
that could be the last. It's the click 
when something snaps shut 
or swings wide, when light strikes 
a metal wing, and the air splits open 
and you pass through without a scratch. 
It's having traveled a great distance 
to find a straggling line of pilgrims 
glimpsed from high up and far away, 
snaking across the mud flats, 
singing in a strange key, their words 
indistinct, the murmurous hum 
of homeward bees, winding skyward 
and drifting over the bay.

Originally published in Cram 11: Poetry about Poetry.