Old Man

Gradually we realize what is felt is not so important

(however lovely or cruel) as what the feeling contains.

Not what happens to us in childhood, but what was

inside what happened. Ken Kesey sitting in the woods,

beyond his fence of whitewashed motorcycles, said when

he was writing on acid he was not writing about it.

He used what he wrote as blazes to find his way back 

to what he knew then. Poetry registers 

feelings, delights and passion, but the best searches

put what is beyond pleasure, is outside process.

Not the passion so much as what the fervor can be

an ingress to. Poetry fishes us to find a world

part by part, as the photograph interrupts the flux

to give us time to see each thing separate and enough.

The poem chooses part of our endless flowing forward

to know its merit with attention.

- Jack Gilbert

Farmer in the Fog