As I stroll along the banks of the Waikanae River, it becomes clear to me that the making of a poem is also the process of translating a pre-verbal phenomenon into an idiom that changes one's perception both of the phenomenon and of the language used to evoke it. Patterning words into poems has become for me an act of language-making that strains towards the unique utterance of what has hitherto been outside the apparent purview of language.
a mosquito
what is not yet
leaps the length
pierces my heart
of our caresses
with its absence