To understand I read a poem.

A poem does not shed light on my confusion but calls my mind to order like a drill sergeant, so it gazes straight, erect, respectful of an order larger than self. On waking my mind is a welter of whirling scraps, recollections, misgivings, disparate details, flailing for guidance. What should I do today? Who should I be? Why? To what end? I could do this or that, explore in any direction, north or east, or (in theory) let the stream of time waft me where it might. No clear deployment is the price of unemployment. Some folks stuff their days with duties to disguise an emptiness. Dread, like love, takes time. I cherish dread as I do love: they feel real. I tap dread like a dried gourd to detect its depths.

A little dread soon becomes enough. All too easy to ponder one’s way into a deep pond with slick banks that threaten drowning. Uncommanded minds may not mind where they’re meandering. Consciousness requires we do something to affix our thoughts to a track. Some folks read the news, others do puzzles, others repair machines – the assignment matters less than that the mind has a means to fish itself from its confusion.

I like reading poems.

A poem that works is a perfected machine, which teases me to unlock its secrets. Why do I like it? Not for its utility – that a poem, like a song, is useless is its bravest boast. Prose is purposive: it seeks to inform, reform, persuade. It prides itself on being worth your while. Any honest poem advances no such claim. It may soothe but not cure, like a wisp of breeze. It rubs against us like an imploring cat.

That’s what Billy Collins is talking about in his delectable “Introduction to Poetry.” We fathom a poem less by logic than analogy. We may “count the ways” we love a poem and arrive no closer to comprehension. I wrack my brain to explain, and this wracking obliges my brain to quit its maundering and focus. Posture stiff, eyes straight, a colonel is visiting to inspect – you are my colonel – my kernel of truth – whom I strain to impress or, at least, not disappoint.

There is no right answer here:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedI ask them to take a poemand hold it up to the lightlike a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poemand watch him probe his way out,or walk inside the poem's roomand feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterskiacross the surface of a poemwaving at the author's name on the shore.But all they want to dois tie the poem to a chair with ropeand torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hoseto find out what it really means.

Or, to put it differently, a poem’s only sufficient explanation is the mystification of a smile.

My time with the poem – and with you, reading it together – removes me from the murk of the mundane. I return to my facts refreshed, “head screwed on straight,” my mind alert, in fighting trim, prepared to present arms, attack. Dread has been dispelled – we’re here to fight, not pout, cadet! And that poem is our reason for fighting.

For any worthy poem advances a promise of beauty, grace, generosity, sharing, truth, the improvement of our kind. The poem’s uplift reminds us tomorrow is worth fighting for.

I need poems more and more these days.