To be understood words are objective
yet we understand them subjectively.
When Willa Cather writes, “The long main street
began at the church, the town seemed to flow
from it like a stream from a spring,” the prose
forms naturally from the simile.
Do you feel it as I do when I read
that words not only are but also live?
From church to street to town to spring as if
the stream itself were writing the sentence
Cather is here with me in the present
bringing from the past continuous gifts
words that are as real as the broken fence
we built with Dad to keep the horses in.