A few days ago, National Public Radio reported that a delivery truck, which was carrying a popular brand of potato chips, was stolen. When the truck was recovered a short time later, twenty-two bags of potato chips had already been eaten.
Imagine the overwhelming feeling (hunger? desire? Insatiable whatever it was!) that overtook him. That is passion! That chip thief's furious feast depicts a moment of human/animal wildness that fills us with an upwelling of unstoppable song.
Mary Oliver writes about such moments. Consider her poem, "Honey At The Table":
It fills you with the soft
essence of vanished flowers, it becomes
a trickle sharp as a hair that you follow
from the honey pot over the table
and out the door and over the ground,and all the while it thickens,
grows deeper and wilder, edged
with pine boughs and wet boulders,
pawprints of bobcat and bear, until
deep in the forest you
shuffle up some tree, you rip the bark,
you float into and swallow the dripping combs,
bits of the tree, crushed bees - - - a taste
composed of everything lost, in which everything lost is found.
Describe the thing that makes you uncontrollably wild. Perhaps, you too are inspired by twinkies, ho ho's or potato chips; perhaps (hopefully) you are enraptured by something with less hydrogenated fats. In any case, whatever wakes the animal-hunger in you is most likely an intrguing poem waiting to happen.
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