Words are not terms,
and thus are not like buckets and kegs
from which we scoop a content that is there.

Words are wellsprings
that are found and dug up in the telling,
wellsprings that must be found
and dug up again and again,
that easily cave in,
but that at times also well up
when least expected.

If we do not go to the spring again and again,
the buckets and kegs stay empty,
or their content stays stale.

What Is Called Thinking by Martin Heidegger, Part II, Lecture II

I am enrolled in a poetry course. The first session was yesterday. The class was reminiscent of a group-therapy session. The facilitator-therapist directed us, insisted that we attend to the lines of a poem, one poem at a time. For me at least, the direction constrained “the noise in my head.” I assume you know what I mean to say by the phrase. You know the residue of concerns, and desires left over from my iphone news feed, or social media posts.

A poem is intentionally constructed, a layered lapidary of meanings. There’s no single meaning that’s correct, rather a richness of thought and sensation, a reminder of how excellent just to be human.

I couldn’t help but reflect upon this tawdry, shabby state of the times in which I live here in America.

I doubt there exists any single composition as “American values”, such as the earlier literary writers once hoped there could or might be: Thoreau, Melville, Cooper, Vonnegut come to mind. We are perpetrator and victim of our excesses, — now in the throes of a love affair with AI. The AI which we are bound to set loose upon ourselves.

21st Century America is a dark poem, a Paen to a neglect of each other. The administration we’ve chosen to run this country is true enough of what we’ve made of ourselves. Also of what we are making of this place.

Here is a poem that we read together, these meanings we absorbed.

Perhaps words as these are life-lines, that we may yet save ourselves?

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

By Robert Frost