Whatever I always imagined a poetry-lover to be, I’m not that person. I was not a quiet, dreamy (read: poetic) kid. I built forts and slept outside in the summer; I made stew out of sticks and pinecones and grass in margarine tubs of hose water. I caught crawdads with a fishing pole I made out of a marshmallow stick. I loved to read, but mostly about kids surviving in the wilderness. Island of the Blue Dolphins, My Side of the Mountain, Julie of the Wolves. That kind of thing. Poetry was boring. Even Shel Silverstein.

But then, when I grew up and had two sons two years apart, my solitary, literary, outdoor-loving life went to shit. I had two little guys in diapers climbing all over me all the time. Whenever I tried to read a book of my own choosing – not, say, Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel for the millionth time—someone emptied a box of Cheerios on the kitchen floor or hit someone else with a block or threw a wad of playdough and broke the living room window. I ended up reading and rereading the same paragraph all day long, never absorbing the words, never moving forward.

I longed for a sense of cohesion and completeness, and if I couldn’t have it in my life (dishes, laundry, diapers, repeat!) then I wanted it in a book. I didn’t want to eddy in the same paragraph; I wanted depth and substance. I wanted to soak in the words until they became a part of me. I was trying, desperately, to hold onto a private life, a place where children and domesticity couldn’t get me. I was trying to dig a fire line.

It occurred to me that if I could read the same paragraph of a novel twelve times a day then I could read an entire poem twelve times a day. Obviously poems were for other people—people who liked poetry and understood it—but maybe I could subsist on poetry until I had time to read novels again. I figured if you’re hungry enough then even those freeze-dried backpacker meals probably taste good.

I bought two suction cups and stuck them to the window over the kitchen sink and strung a wire between them. Then I clipped poems to the wire. All day, whenever I filled sippy cups or washed dishes, I read poems.

I didn’t understand them word-for-word, but when I softened my focus and stopped trying to pin them down, their meanings glimmered in my peripheral vision. The more I read, the more I noticed the hinge, the place in a poem where the meaning turned in one direction or another. I found trapdoors, places where the poem’s floor had seemed solid until I walked over the words for the sixteenth time and found myself tumbling deeper.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I was heading into what would be some of my darkest, hardest years, and those poems clipped to the window became their own tiny windows – they showed glimpses of another life. Stray lines found their way into my thoughts, repeating the way a song lyric might. “Joy is not meant to be a crumb,” Mary Oliver kept whispering. “Keep me from going to sleep too soon,” Robert Francis said. “There’s a thread you follow,” William Stafford said. “It goes among things that change, but it doesn’t change. People wonder about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread. But it is hard for others to see. While you hold it you can’t get lost . . .”

Uh oh, I thought. These poets are gonna mess up my life. These poets are talking about the things I can’t say aloud. Not even to myself.

How did they do it? How did they name the most real things about being human without naming them? The lines, the stanzas were like a finger pointing to something beyond language. They didn’t label an experience but they gave me access to it. Even though poems were made of words, they were also full of silence. The poem itself became an energetic threshold, a place of encounter.

I began to wander the rooms of my life the same way I wandered through poems. Not “figuring it out” as much as devoting my attention and letting it be. And, in ways both terrifying and liberating, I discovered hinges and trapdoors there too. Places where my life turned in one direction or another, places that had seemed solid but then suddenly opened beneath me.

Slowly, in their diffused, elliptical way, the poets taught me something that I could not have learned directly: that the mundane, fragmented world of young kids and domesticity was simultaneously the transcendent, cohesive world that I craved. “Except for the point, the still point, there would be no dance, and there is only the dance,” T.S. Eliot said, and in the place where I met poetry, all things in opposition ceased existing. The only thing that remained was a vibrant energetic relationship between the dance and the still point, solitude and motherhood, the desire for separateness and the desire for connection. The tensions I perceived as unresolvable in my life remained unresolved on a certain plane, but the poets were pointing to another plane where I could rest from the tension by softening, by opening the peripheral vision of my spirit.

When I think about what saved my life during the years of raising young children, the years of single motherhood and full-time teaching, I see the poems clipped to that wire over the sink. I see the shapes of the words.