Poetry is
the antidote to the poison of rationality; the best friend
entropy ever had; the botany of the impossible wedded
to the chemistry of the ineffable; the jewel in the heart
of the flotsam; the mote in the eye of the lotus; the
canary in the mind. Or else, to lift an image from one
old poet, it is “all the history of grief” consolidated into
“an empty doorway and a maple leaf.” Or perhaps it is
a vision of the harsh mugs on Mount Rushmore, aeons
hence, eroding into long, mournful portraits by the
geological equivalent of Modigliani; or that of two
crows perched on a withered limb, just across the
street from the county seat. Or maybe it is simply
the antique urgency of this mouth moving at this
moment, with all these other mouths, continuing to
shape and tune a common tongue, a common song,
leaping from the body into someone’s arms, or head,
or breakfast, leaping into the very air that mothered
it in the lungs, dancing and leaping even as we sleep,
even as we sag, bend, curdle, and vote Republican
—Mikhail Horowitz