Ashless

Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash. ~ Leonard Cohen

It burns intense, and it also burns slow -

great heat, a sheer blue flame, finely haloed

but it yields nothing, no ash, minimal glow

and there’s no charred heap once it’s out, no broad

smear on soil from which meanings can be clawed.

Yes, it’s poetry, that tiny rimmed blue leap,

that transparent smoke with its musky smell

though it leaves no trace of itself in the sweep

of its own wide dispersal.  Hard to tell,

to tease out the proof that it’s burning well.

Because that quote from Cohen just took my brain in its jaws this morning and worried it like a big cat with its prey.