Greensleeves and The One Poem

So I'm curled up on the couch in the family room; in the parlor Scott is improvising beautifully on Greensleeves, switching back and forth between piano and guitar. It used to drive me mad to hear him play something so lovely and know it wasn't being recorded; I couldn't hold onto it, have it again. So different from poetry, which you can always have again. But I've become accustomed. It exists for the moment and I hear it; that's enough. When I breathe in, I smell the daphne odora aureomarginata -- part lemon and part heaven -- trimmed from the bush that was my grandmother's, now my mother's. The small blooms are four-pointed stars with a glitter in their white faces and a purple-rose reverse. Gold piping around the green leaves.

C. Dale Young is talking/asking about "the one" -- the poem that grabbed you by the throat, pulled you beyond yourself. I wish I could remember just one. I didn't encounter so much a single poem as a good teacher, Jim Mitsui, in my freshman year. He started us off on the Williams red wheelbarrow and "this is just to say" (plum poem). The poems that still stick in my memory from those years are "On Hearing A New Escalation", "Landscapes", and "The Art of Poetry" by Richard Hugo, "Lost" and "A Field Guide To Dungeness Spit" by David Wagoner, and "Mirror" by Sylvia Plath. And William Stafford, Kenneth O. Hanson, Neruda.

I didn't encounter "The Second Coming" until a few years ago, and it blew me away. Out of every poem I've ever read, that's the one I'd most like to have written, or something just like it, with the same power. It's surprising (in a good way) how many other poets feel the same.