"Introduction to Poetry"

  I ask them to take a poem
  and hold it up to the light
  like a color slide

  or press an ear against its hive.

  I say drop a mouse into a poem
  and watch him probe his way out,

  or walk inside the poem’s room
  and feel the walls for a light switch.

  I want them to waterski
  across the surface of a poem
  waving at the author’s name on the shore.

  But all they want to do
  is tie the poem to a chair with rope
  and torture a confession out of it.

  They begin beating it with a hose
  to find out what it really means.