Poetry and Prose

I know that a group of buffalos
is called an obstinacy, and a group
of owls is a parliament. I learned

Pangea is the name of a continent
that existed 200 million years ago, 
and how to write a five-paragraph theme.
 
From high school I remember the Pythagorean 
theorem, but not the formula for the quadratic 
equation or the slope-intercept form of a line. 

I know there are questions no one has found 
a proper answer for— like, is there any thought 
that's truly original? or, where do things
 
we have forgotten go? Now and then someone
asks about what the difference is between prose
and poetry. One could talk about structures 

like sentences and paragraphs vs. lines and stanzas, 
patterns that repeat according to the design dictated 
by meaning and metaphor. Emily Dickinson said 

poetry is what made her feel the top of her head 
had been taken off; and Mary Oliver wrote about 
how the language of the poem is the language of

particulars. In either prose or poetry, one 
could write of a column of chickens or an armory 
of aardvarks, and somewhere in there is the little 

frisson of pleasure from rubbing two sticks together. 
There's no flame but there's fire, leaping from word 
to image to some surprising view of the world.