Poetry cannot shovel your walk. It can't find your lost umbrella or convince your four-year-old that he will not learn to swim by flushing his head down the toilet. Poetry cannot cap corporate salaries, rid a garden of marauding squirrels or run out to the dep for you before eleven. Poetry has trouble staying employed, and it has done things you couldn't tell your mother. Dishes, taxes, overdue library books - if you're looking to make nothing happen, poetry's your man.

Poetry entails some responsibility: to see the world; to make the words earn their keep, to make extraordinary leaps and to earn readers' trust so they land safe and amazed. To listen inside the poem even when the ego seems louder. Dusted off, slowed down, unlatched - poetry is frogs calling from inside a long marriage with ruthless frailty; it is the unclaimed bodies, the lousy, funny blind date, the music in the hockey roster; as John Steffler puts it, it is the backdrop falling down in folds.

In my everyday today the starlings are pecking at the frozen grapes that grow wild in the alley. There's poetry without, and within.

-- Katia Grubisic "Ice Wine." Arc Poetry Magazine (Winter 2012)