dis cur sive

dis cur sive: adjective

2. proceeding by reasoning or argument rather than intuition.

Poetry and jokes have at least one thing in common: unlike narrative they're not discursive forms. You "get" them or you don't, and an explanation typically ruins their beauty.

Unlike my poetry group friends, I know only a little more than nothing about poetry. But the attitude I've come upon after reading some over the years is this:

1. poetry isn't "about" things ... it is the thing itself, in a sense. It's not discursive; it's not an explanation.
2. to enjoy it there's no objective sense in which one must "get" a poem: stop worrying about whether your interpretation is what was intended by the author. Does it speak to you? That's enough.
3. as with other forms of art, take what you want, draw it in, and don't worry about the rest, or what others think, or what you think you're "supposed" to get. It's a subjective experience: you're the only one who knows the right answer. You get to decide.

This brings to mind a quote by Bernard Phillips who is, I believe, a professor of religion:

Do not seek to find out "what to do." Every "what to do" is only an abstraction. You will never come to the truth of your own being by riding on the back of an abstraction. If you know "what to do," you can be sure it is the wrong thing.

Beautiful.

Well, despite this elaborate introduction I want to do "what shouldn't be done" and give some background on the woodpecker verse:

Spring comes
The woodpecker returns
Every year
Until now

I watched a redheaded woodpecker closely enough over a number of years to know about him and the mannerisms that distinguished him from other woodpeckers. He came in spring and left in fall.

His summer home was across the street from my house in a tall pine tree that had lost its top in an ice storm ... a gray post absent bark and branch. Every year he returned, patiently drilling out a new hole in that dead tree over the course of several days. Then he would find a mate, raise his offspring, and leave ... where to?

He liked a peanut feeder I created just for woodpeckers, who have very long and round tongues (did you know?) that can reach into tree cavities and find things to eat. In the first year, he figured out how to reach into the feeder and get peanuts, and then every year after that he taught his offspring how to do so.

He became sort of a buddy of mine. One time I watched him being pursued in flight by a hawk. It was the most amazing and (in a way, for me) horrifying thing I'd seen ... right above my house. But in this life-or-death moment, with the hawk right behind him, the woodpecker maneuvered so gracefully, as though with perfect calm, and I admired him so. After so many curves and turns and twists he finally escaped danger. It was beautiful.

So I watched him like this for probably four or five years. The year he didn't return, I somehow knew he wasn't coming back.

I still wonder about him from time to time.