Paul Muldoon

THE AIM

That sense of the poem as having always been
in some world just to the side of our own
is a sense that is itself inherited.
The shad comes back to the reedbed
in which it was spawned to spawn again.
The sense of the poem as having always been
as the redknot is bent on that selfsame patch
of tundra grass on which it was hatched.
But just beyond fin- and wing-reach
is the stretch of shallow water or the stretch
of deep snow in which the shad- or redknot poem
is taking what might almost seem an aim.

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