introduction_to_poetry ovenbird In the brumal glow of the afternoon she reads “Introduction to Poetry” by Billy Collins. Billy says: I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against its hive. I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out, or walk inside the poem’s room and feel the walls for a light switch. I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author’s name on the shore. But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means. She thinks: My body is the poem. And he is the reader. 260105 ... raze he can't recall the first poem he read. he remembers the first song that bit into him. the first film that flooded his world with feeling. the first time another nascent hand reached for his own. but whatever language woke him up to the music words could weave is gone. strange, he thinks, that a moment this formative could fade so fully. like the birthmark he was sure stained the diamond-shaped depression on the back of his left knee, until one morning he woke to find it gone. thin thread stitched into some small scene he must have dreamed. maybe the shell of the story isn't as important as what lives in its marrow. he decides the first time he watched a line break and bend itself into something beautiful wasn't in any book or sea of pixels, but when a smile became a kiss no sonnet or villanelle could hope to capture. 260105 what's it to you? who go blather from