Lately I’ve been thinking more about my vocation – poetry. That I am deposited at Mile Post 604, the land between the bridges, is a matter of occupation. It’s how I (currently) operate in the world machine. There are different machines running simultaneously, all part of the same massive engine of things: but no one really knows how big that engine is or if it moves something or if moving itself is the only purpose. I serve different functions in different machines. In the world machine I am deposited at Mile Post 604, standing watch over another machine. Soon enough I will be closer to its belly. My function will change slightly. But not in terms of the world or any other machine.

Poetry is a difficult machine to move occupation forward. People manage it, as is their function I suppose. I haven’t written the notion off completely, but like Robert Frost once wrote, I have promises to keep. This is something I had trouble explaining to another poet once. She, thinking probably that she had my best interests at heart, wanted me to forgo my promises, risk losing the home my wife and I make together, quite literally, to the bank, to go out to California for what would have been my 2nd to last residency towards my MFA. She couldn’t hear me, or I wasn’t speaking with the proper metaphors. She was the chair of the program and was used to less weathered poets. I think she probably assumed I was scared to take a risk. Risk doesn’t scare me, but my promises do weigh on me. How a person answers their obligations, real or imagined, determines what kind of machine they will end up being. And I am, if nothing else, very specific about my obligations, who or what I owe, and who or what deserves my focus and attention. I ended up being rude to make my point… which I regret, only because I was rude, not the reason for it. She graces the pages of prestigious poetry journals. I’m at Mile Post 604, the land between the bridges. But my home is safe, I got the degree anyway, and the world machine continues its clockwork motions.

Some reader or another, some poet or another, might object to the description of poetry as a machine, to a human being as machine. The latter is not an especially new metaphor and William Carlos Williams, a fine poet, described poetry as the former long before I did. The objector might assume that machines do not feel.

Let me suggest that in order to be sure of that, once must first know how to talk machine language.