The Perfect Poem

Sometimes you are given the key to decipher the language of trees, of rivers, the secret liturgy of the earth. It is not a language of words but a kind of momentary infusion of feeling, unfiltered, so pure that it slips through the coarseness of speech and arrives as a sudden insight in the full clarity of itself. You try and capture its reflection or its echo in words, attempt to coral its presence within the confines of a page but it always escapes leaving whispers in its wake or a pang in a place where something should be. There are days when you pause and listen to what murmurs up from deep within the well of yourself, all the poems you have written most of which have been forgotten or have become mute or are now no more than empty shells abandoned by what was there. And there are some that rise up out of the silence and once more claim the ear of your soul, convey a formless magic that seems to reside there just below the words. There are no perfect poems just those that have made room for something beyond the self to speak. These are the ones you keep.