How to Get into a Poem

So many times you’ve stared at the words,
Which are mostly ordinary words
In mostly ordinary syntax
In your widely spoken mother tongue,

And those printed and/or glowing words
Stared back at you, which is to say,
Sat silently on the screen or page
While your brain tried to feel for a dance,

Some shiver of choreography,
Some suggestion of inspiration,
Amounting to an invitation
Into the gathering density

Of their dark, deciduous ideas.
Tonight, the letters look like black twigs,
Like crosshatched ink, like dripping black
Brush somehow growing through midwinter,

The blackness overwriting the snow.
It will be all darkness soon, no one’s
Mother tongue. The words will say nothing,
And you’ll finally be in the poem.