How This Poet Thinks by Patricia Fargnoli

I don’t think
like lawyers,
quick in the mind,
rapid as a rat-a-tat-tat,or academics, who pile logic up
like wood to get them through the winter.

I think the way someone listensin a still place for the sound of quiet
—or the way my body sways
at the transition zone, back and forth
between field and woods —
a witching stick

—or as though I were inhabiting the seasons
between winter and spring,
between summer and fall —
finding those in-between places
that need me to name them.

When I think, sometimes it is
like objects rushing through a tunnel,
and sometimes
it is like water in a well with dirt sides,
where the wetness is completely absorbed

and the ground rings with dampness,
becomes a changed thing.
Other times it is the way sea fog rises off
the swelling green of the ocean
and covers everything but illuminates itself.

I think with my skin open like the frog
who takes in the rain by osmosis.
I delve into the groundhog holes
where no words follow.
Slow, so slow I think, and cannot hold
the thoughts except when they come down

hard on the paper where they are malleable,
can be shifted, worked at like clay.
I think like this: with my brain stem,
and with the site of emotions
the way I imagine the fox thinks,
trapped in his present need

but moving freely — his eyes quick
toward the day’s desire —
and the way, beneath the surface
of the water, the swimmer’s legs hang down
above the tendrils of the jelly fish
which wave in the filtered light.

I think in tortoise-time,
dream-time, limbic time,
like a waterfall, a moth’s wing,
like snow — that soundless, that white.

from Necessary Light, Utah State University Press, 1999