To make two bald statements: There's nothing sentimental about a
    machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made of
    words... Prose may carry a load of ill-defined matter like a ship.
    But poetry is the machine which drives it, pruned to a perfect
    economy. As in all machines its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a
    physical more than a literary character...
    When a man makes a poem, makes it, mind you, he takes words as
    he finds them interrelated about him and composes them--without
    distortion which would mar their exact significances--into an intense
    expression of his perceptions and ardors that they may constitue a
    revelation in the speech that he uses. It isn't what he says that
    counts as a work of art, it's what he makes.
                                --William Carlos Williams,
                                  from "Authors Introduction to The Wedge"
 
 

THE GREAT FIGURE

Among the rain
and lights
I saw the figure 5
in gold
on a red
firetruck
moving
tense
unheeded
to gong clangs
siren howls
and wheels rumbling
through the dark city.