Once Reached

To T. S. Eliot

                  Once Reached

       I don’t believe I ever told you
             what you did for me,
                 how your words
               reached out to me.

         Why, if it weren’t for you,
               I don’t know what 
               I would have done.
        Maybe I would have found
           the bottom of that hole
                  or quit digging
               and begun staring.
         Instead, I ran clear across
              the world, right into
          the confines of a poem.

              That hole remains,
    just beyond my peripheral view.
           The words have been
                enough for me.
        They are larger than I am
       and l hope they outlive me.

             I want them to leap
         beyond these confines,
                  as I once did,
         and reach all the holes.
          Because these words,
           when spoken clearly, 
       can reach pretty far down
             and once reached,
          you're never the same.

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” was the first poem that knocked the wind right out of me. I have to be cautious around it as it still stuns me.

"Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table"