My other school poem is called "At This Point on the Page."
"Frightened at the slope of the writing,
I looked up at the student who shared it with me.
Such pain was in the crossing of each T,
and a heart that skipped, lurched in the loop of the Y.
Sorrowing for the huddled words my eyes had seen,
the terror of those Os and As and those draggled Gs,
I looked up at her face, not wanting to read farther,
at least by prose.
The hand shook that wrote that far on the page.
And what way it formed each letter, God knows."
To read this with those little words at the end,
God knows, connecting with prose a couple of lines
above makes me think that--
of another thing I'd like to try to assert about writing.
I wouldn't like to think of myself as a poet,
but as a writer, just with the language.
And one reason is that I had been brought up--
had this feeling that a poet is a person who is intermittently
responsible for the sound.
It goes da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, June, da, da, da, da,
da, da, da, da, moon.
And the scene didn't amount to very much to me.
And I still think it doesn't, but I no longer
think that's what writing is.
But instead, a writer is totally responsible for the sound so
that, well, instead of rhyme, which I still recognize,
sort of, I think about, well, maybe chime or some--
or like this.
Instead of thinking that some syllables rhyme
with other syllables, and the others are just neutral, just
to sort of in the way, I think that all syllables rhyme,
sort of.
Indulge me for a minute.
That is, any syllable sounds more like any other syllable
than it sounds like silence.
So you start from this end instead of from the other end.
And this makes everything go along.
And it's all either helping or hurting
or neutral that it might as well be helping.
And that doesn't always mean just rhyming by any means.