How Poetry Makes Poets
Grail Arnica

As an early aspiration
I wished to go out in
all one breath, and thought
sixteen years enough;
but if by chance
twenty-one
would come,
to live like a holy scientist
on baked beans and hand caught fish,
a silhouette shouting on the shore
wild and lovely words all night
across gothic dark water;

And then came the days
and years where
all I had
was to not be mad,
to live quietly
in the quickly
opaque lines of rage
that were my refuge
from banality,
from a frozen life—
more nearly dead
than I now can say.

Even then I found
a private awe, an
interior sky of storms,
clouds of outrageous fire—
holding the compass
of points labeled
“Now”
“Soon”
“Waken”
“End”

Where poisonous flowers,
burnished rivers
crowned beasts, jeweled birds of
louche and llithesome language
created singing chasms
in chaos’s heart—
as a map in an old atlas
places the edges
where dragons dream,
poets loving me cast a net,
drew from me
the leaping elusive joy.
Caught, it must be sought
to learn again how to seek,
how to know when it is missing,
how to hold it when it is found—
when who you are is loved
by who you have become.

All this time—now I know better
each word I find
was always there,
on the edge of the unknown,
or beckoning from just
past that place;

words irrefutable,
risen without choice,
risen for whatever
has used me for a voice.
I think that, perhaps—
that is all that has made me
who I am,
or ever made a poet.