The Scientifical

Silting. The name of this practice stands

sufficiently familiar to us, though the particulars of practice

less so. Silting for poems (not to be confused with

tilling, a topic which we’ll discuss later),

We have heard,

requires a few of the following:

 

a Peter Pan,

an echo,

a long handled fork,

a pitchfork,

an electrical grounding

 

To what shall we liken the practice of the poem silting, or

to what shall we compare it?
It resembles

pushing birds through sieves, or

it reminds of

sifting shiny sand.

 

Thus an experience of the world,

taken in hand,

is shoved through a collection of tiny holes

and then

purposefully reassembled

from paste. This matter reconstruction

we call, as with which you are familiar, the poem.

We can thus, for this treatise,

settle on the definition of a poem as

the holed then wholed experience.
The poem is the final product of this experience

not to be confused with

the experience itself.

 

We do now turn our attention to

silting, which we will now admit

is not a word, a point which we will now

admittedly ignore

and continue. Silting

sits as language to describe the transitive process

in which one engages

when carrying a collection of world experiences

from their raw experience states

to a poem state, i.e.

the experience itself mentioned

above. Imagine

if you will—

 

It has been brought to our attention that

silting, in fact, is a word,

stemming from the verb silt, which is,

as defined by our dictionary of reference

the office intern,

which is, as defined by our reference,

“to become filled or blocked with sand,”

From “silt,” we thus easily

extrapolate the gerund

“silting.”

 

This commoners’ definition poses an

infringement on our treatise purpose.

We will briefly note that when “silting”

is used in a sentence poetically

its meaning shifts away from

this accumulating connotation

the word has gathered from the rusty

English language

towards, well

what we continue here to define.

 

Imagine if you will

that you have gathered your days’ experiences

into a sieve. Each experience has been measured

for you

to place with precision

into your sieve

as a cup of dirt. For example, after

you enjoyed your morning meal

of yogurt with honey with your husband, and

discussed, for example,

impending logistics of divorce,

you received—you need not worry

about the source—you received

a cup of dirt to pour

into your sieve.

As you proceeded throughout your day,

you gathered similar cups of soil

and placed them in your sieve.

 

Thus, it follows, that you have

reached the close of your day,

and, as many men and women do desire,

aspire to draw a poem,

also known as a poetical experience,

from the day’s conducted events.

 

And here we have the crux of the matter:

silting, as used in a poetical context,

refers to the process of shaking

your day’s experiences, the dirt,

through the sieve. Through the process of,

in a poetical context,

silting, select elements of the day’s

experiences pass through the sieve and

accrue—perhaps it is the same word after all—

accrue into poems. Thus from the day’s dirt

shakes out and gathers

a silted poem.