conclusion, the pleasure of French, which I had studied for years but never really used, not like this, surrounded by it, immersed; it was amazing to me that the language worked, it was like a magic trick to speak and be understood, like the suspension of gravity or breathing underwater, a violation of natural laws.

It did no good for me now, a line would come and then slip away, taking with it the poem, Busy old fool, I work all day, I wake and feel, How vainly men; no sooner did I catch a phrase than it was gone. It was like spinning the dial on an old radio, though that wasn’t quite right; they scattered of their own accord, they were creaturely somehow,

I tried to think of poems, the poems I had memorized; for years I had been memorizing poems and then reciting them at night, as I tried to sleep, as a way of calming my mind,

It wasn’t hard for me to imagine them sentient, ensouled, the only religion that has ever really made sense to me is the worship of trees.

the little pink flowers flaming our yard, our gay harbinger. The first time I saw it in bloom I thought of Shakespeare’s first sonnet, Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament And only herald to the gaudy spring.

staring at the poem as I might stare at a painting, which if you do long enough you make discoveries, the painting opens up, you tune yourself to its frequency.

But that knowledge is experiential, you can’t explain it or demonstrate it or guarantee it, you can only try to tempt students toward it, entice them,

The point was to perceive reality, I wanted to

tell them, to see things that are only visible at a different speed, a different pitch of attention, the value of poems is tuning us to a different frequency of existence.