The American poet and fiction writer, Jim Harrison,
has said that poetry at its best is the language
you would give your soul if you could teach your soul to speak.
Poets, he says, are an odd sort who feel called upon
to make up strange, lovely songs about death
and the indefinite reprieve we are all in the process of traveling through.
Maybe it has to do with the adage that poets
can't drive and they also bum the novelist's cigarettes,
at least that is how it is for me.
I am a terrible driver, a terrible pedestrian,
and I have proof, but then again, poetry is proof
of something bigger than us and what we see.