Now this one is--
this next poem is a verse poem.
And it has an uneven right hand margins.
I mean, I'm-- and the only difference, I suppose,
between the prose poems in the verse poems really,
aside from the fact that the language in them behaves very
differently, if you think about it,
a poem with a justified right-hand margins,
which is not a poem, in fact, at all but is in prose,
you realize that the energy of the language is to keep
on going.
It's really only a printer's or book binders convention
that prose goes back to the margin at all.
If it weren't for the need to bind it in a book,
a novel would be just one thin, long ribbon of type,
stretching as far as it took if you had to lay out Dombey
and Son along the ground.
You could probably go to Wichita with that.
But with a verse, the language starts out across the page
and then it goes back to the margin and then back
out and back.
And you get this serpentine motion down the page
so that in poetry, you not only have a line that goes out,
but you also have a line that moves down
the page, which is like a meander in a river or a path
that a snake leaves in the dust when it travels.
Anyway, enough of aesthetic generalizing
about the difference between verse and prose poems.
This is a verse poem called "Driving
Alongside the Housatonic River Alone on a Rainy April Night."
I'm fond of titles with a lot of data in them
because then the poem starts right away at the beginning.
And in this poem, it starts with the speaker
remembering a question he asked adults when he was a child.
"I remember asking, where does my shadow go at night?
I thought it went home.
It grew so sleek at dusk.
They said, you just don't notice it
the way you don't tell yourself how to walk or hear
a noise that doesn't stop.
But one wrong wobble in the socket
and inside the knee, chalk is falling, school is over.
As if the ground were a rung, suddenly gone from a ladder.
The self, the shoulders bunched against the roads each bump.
The penis with its stupid grin, the whole rank slum of cells
collapses.
I feel the steering wheel tug a little.
Testing.
For as long as that takes, the car
is a sack of kittens, weighed down by stones.
The headlights chase a dark ripple across some birch trees.
I know it's there.
Water hurrying over the shadow of water."