What conclusions might we be able to draw about very short poems, from this handful of examples? First, that their tare weight need not be light. Traditional English epigrams tend towards wit, satire, cleverness (a historical accident perhaps explaining why very brief poems tend to be undervalued in English-language poetry). A quick glance shows their Greek antecedents were far more fluid, multi-tonal attempts to summarize a life in a few stone-carved lines. Wit has its pleasures and uses, but short poems need not depend on that single pivot for point. They share a quality, but that quality is neither simply time length nor the prick of the needle. It's also worth noticing that while very short poems may not tell the whole story, they still can hold both narrative and the passage of time--Catullus's couplet conveys the whole plot-line of his and Lesbia's love. Also clear: the concerns of very short poems, as even these few examples surely convince, can be as substantive and nuanced as Wordsworth's "The Prelude." The difference though is that the exploration is done footstep by footstep: one constellation of experience, one breath's inhalation and exhalation, at a time.

When I question these poems for their seed germ, their wound-up watch-spring, what steps forward for me is change. Alteration of being is encoded in the DNA of any very short poem that feels in truth to be a poem. Some almost impossible but not impossible tension is named, stored and, at the same time, released not by erasure but by having been entered more deeply into: The Buddhist truth of transience and the truth of loss's repercussion in the heart. Hate and love as equals in the experience of eros. The simultaneous existences of beauty and suffering. The rhyme that shows "dwarfish whole" binds fast with "soul."

The stone of existence cracks at the tap of any good poem. It fissures, gives entrance to something that did not exist before. Very short poems, in this way, do what all real poems do. Smally or largely, they alter the self and the world.