Meeting the Perfect Poem I imagine that the perfect poem will walk right off of the page and shake my hand and tell me “here’s what I’m about.” She will have honest eyes, and as we talk I’ll inevitably find that she’s remarkably transparent, a beautifully simple soul, the kind who finds it inherent in her to laugh at a baby’s smile or take true joy in crunching Autumn leaves along September walks. We’ll amiably shoot the breeze a while until I feel I know her in full, but right when I believe that life really is that simple she’ll leave laid bare a strand on which I’ll pull to unravel an intricate world beneath, a tangled mess of complex truth and lies where on looks like the other, a world where underneath the stark simplicity of her outward beauty there lies an intimate understanding that life is not so simple and yet it is, that life is but a web of paradox, a constant tension between the