Richard Siken 

SENTENCE 

When does a line end?  A line ends when it is broken. If a line is too long, the line continues after it hits the margin, indented, for as long as you choose to maintain it. When does a sentence end? A sentence ends at the period. Until the period, the sentence flows like water, seeking its own level, moving forward relentlessly—sometimes in a fast run past a tight curve, laminar with little words and clipped thoughts as it races toward the tiny falls that change the slope of the stream to a drop; or it jumps around in short, sharp bursts, choppy over the rocks, the commas, turbulent, the rapids throwing spray, here, there, rampageous, ungovernable; or it can slow, redirected by aqueducts and waterwheels, pooling behind dams as methodical thought fills the basins with inscrutable language, replete with unnecessarily awkward constructions choked with the debris of semicolons, parentheticals, and asides sandwiched between dashes—as if the heavy, dependent clauses designed to bear the weight of a significant hypothesis or the observations of an astute philosopher (intent on gathering secret knowledge into a concordance or compendium that could provide a solid foundation for future thinkers to construct their architectures) whose thoughts—tangled, unintelligible; gathering dust in a lost folio or falling flat in the lecture hall as the blank, upturned faces watch the clock on the wall behind him for evidence that this ordeal will eventually satisfy the contract and arrive (though Zeno would argue that arrival is impossible [i.e., there will always be more river in front of you if you continue to divide your journey by half]) at its inevitable conclusion—finally elucidate the endeavor to make visible some new horizon.