Poetry: Asking the Impossible Question

I don’t know what poetry is.  Speaking in terms of literature, it’s relatively simple.  The Oxford Dictionary calls a poem, “a metrical composition, usually concerned with feeling or imaginative description.”  A rather dry description, but accurate all the time.  Poetry is words built with rhythm, concerned with sound and feeling and imagery. 

But there’s so much more to it than that.  I don’t consider myself a poet, and yet sometimes I feel the words sliding through my mind like snakes, twisting restlessly.  Taking off my makeup after work, I think of my eyelashes melting, shifting shadows and then gone, leaving red shadows of weariness.  I look at a woman as I’m setting down her meal and decide she has a meek mouth, but strength in her bent fingers.  Poetry moves through me, a spark in the brain, a weakness in my limbs, stronger when it’s been a month or two since last I put my thoughts to the page in this way.  For others, those who define themselves by poetry, it must be a compulsion, the only way they can understand the world.

What is poetry?  What is it in us that drives us to anguish, to agony, if we can’t describe the world as it needs to be described?  I don’t know if I want to know the answer.  The power of poetry is in the seeking, finding the wrong words, but just the right wrong words—the providential mistake.  The power of poetry is in the almost knowing.