Someone asked me what my poems were about.
Not unkindly. Genuinely curious, the way people are genuinely curious when they encounter something that does not fit into their existing categories and want help placing it. What are they about. And I heard myself start to explain, start to frame it in the language that makes things legible to people who are not inside them, start to say: well, they are about labour and grief and the body and rest and the cost of caring for the people we love while also caring for ourselves, they are about being a woman at a certain age in a certain kind of life trying to understand what the life has meant and what it is still becoming.
And halfway through I stopped.
Not because the explanation was wrong. It was accurate as far as it went. But the explaining was already doing something to the poems, was already reducing them to their paraphrasable content, was treating them as though the content was the poem rather than understanding that the poem is how the content is held, that the specific weight of a line is not the same as the subject of the line, that a poem about grief is not the same as a description of grief and the difference is the whole of why poetry exists.
I said: read one.
Just that. I stopped explaining and I said read one, and I meant it, meant that the poem would do what I could not do by talking about it, that the poem was the explanation and any other explanation was already less than the poem. I have spent my whole academic life explaining things. I am good at the explaining. I know what explaining is for and I know what it cannot do and what it cannot do is be the poem. The poem has to be the poem. The only way into a poem is through it.
She read one.
She was quiet for a moment after. Then she said: oh. The oh that is not a response to what something is about but to what something did, to the way a thing landed, to the arrival of the thing itself rather than the description of it.
Oh. That is the whole of what any poem is trying to get to. That one syllable that means: I felt something true. I am not explaining the poems anymore. I am just handing them over. The rest is between the reader and the page.
