An Argument Against Intention In Poetry Poem by Dennis Ryan

Friday, June 17,2022

'I hear your voice/It's like an angel sighing...'
Madonna, 'Like A Prayer'

I didn't intend to write the poem of Wednesday morning,
nor this one, the one that surprises now: they just happen.
Poems, it seems, are sensed somewhere in the mind,
may begin perhaps in Merkel cells that encode touch
and send out neural signals. At some point, unconscious
memories arrive which require a prompt (to translate) ,
your voice a trigger. The time arrives and I know then
there's a time for you, a time for me, 'a lying against time'
as it were in which you and I might last—here, then,
is the poem's purpose, where it instinctively means to go,
travelling under our skins, felt in touch, yours and mine.