Why Poetry: A Partial Autobiography ["How tense it makes me, reading..."]

How tense it makes me, reading poetry, knowing how much I miss, misunderstand, how only some of the words resolve under my eyes into sentences while others slip by unnoticed, like a note inscribed on a greeting card by an aunt who never knew me well. What I mean is the job is never done, I’m never through. And I’m not made for tasks that linger; some of me is always considering all the money I owe to banks and credit card companies and the kid who kindly bought me most of my high school lunches because my dad forgot to send me to school with a couple of bucks. Which is of course to say reading poetry is a metaphor. Nothing ever finishes. ~ So why did I choose poetry? Maybe because it acknowledges right away what scares me most, how the line breaks before the thought is done, how the line, a partial thing, is the measure, and it’s never enough. My college love never did come running back after I sent her that photocopied pamphlet of heartbroke verses, and my lamentation did not un-injure my son or get me back my job. ~ I woke up panting and confused from the same nightmare over and over through childhood—I can’t remember when it stopped: my task was to build with colored blocks atop a floating green island a kind of little city; this was urgent—there would be no forgiveness if it was not complete. The dream ended with me standing before this hovering shard of land as it hovered away, my job still undone, and I was dropped back into my bed to beg my mother for something she could understand but not give. It’s hard now not to see it as a premonition, maybe a preparation for her dying only a few years later, her life, my life like all lives, unfinished. ~ And so I came to poetry.