Don't try to understand the poem.
There is a kind of death imposed by those who try and understand
it fully.
Even just the understanding impulse includes some desire
to be done, some desire to complete the experience
that one might get on to new experiences, new poems.
But there is something inherently indiscreet
about a meaningful poem.
It is in yourself or someone else or the world making
meaning and meaningful things are always in motion.
By the very nature of us, people, finding them that way.
Fire on it like a Dante to his pigeon.
One day disposed of oxygen by flame.
The poem in flux, the reader in flux,
the magnetic relation of poems to each other,
them shifting, tugging, pulling each other
into alignment or relation, and it's less mystical
than it sounds.
If I have a pile small poems, go through it, read it, listen,
and it is not the moment of any one thing
but a shared momentum tumbling together.
The relational push and pull as parts of one thing.
No, not really that.
You hear a sound, you hear a sound repeated.
And feeling those things sometimes recognized,
your relation to both is changed.
And there's to each other.
In being recognized, but just in being,
too, you are writing, moving, listening your way through.
It's how the poems get made.
As you bring new poems into their space,
as new poems are there beside them
being read aloud and heard, time, tones of others
dragged in and each new relation with each new neighbor poem,
causing shifts and changes.