The ability to name poetry's gestures and rhetorics isn't required to write or read them, any more than a painter needs to know the physics of color to bring forward a landscape. The eye and hand and ear know what they need to know. Some of us want to know more, because knowing pleases.

So much of our lives depends on accidents of birth, time, and geography. This haunts me. In some lives, few "or"s are possible. The pain of that is behind the second stanza of this poem.

If truth is the lure, humans are fishes.

At some unnoticed moment, I began to understand that a life is written in indelible ink.

I will never become a horse trainer, a biologist, a person competent with a hammer. My loves were my loves.

Passion does not make careful arguments: it declares itself, and that is enough.

Good poems ask us to have complex minds and hearts. Even simple-of-surface poems want that. Perhaps those are the ones that want it most of all, since that's where they do their work: in the unspoken complexities, understood off the page.