Last term, I took a course at Trinity Lutheran Seminary called Rhetorics and Poetics for Preaching. We read (parts of) a book by Steve Kowitt entitled In the Palm of Your Hand: The Poet’s Portable Workshop (Gardiner: Tilbury House, 2007), with the tagline, “A lively and illuminating guide for the practicing poet.”
Kowitt describes a form of poetry in which the traditional Japanese haiku is transformed into an American sentence poem of seventeen syllables, with or without the line breaks, citing Kerouac and Ginsberg as practitioners of the form (p. 74).
All of this, of course, is a very long introduction to a very short “poem.”
The opaque glass door turned suddenly transparent as he stumbled through.
or, to put it another way:
The opaque glass door
turned suddenly transparent
as he stumbled through
over the water 