Reading poetry is a skill that does not come to everyone. Poetry is tougher than a novel, mainly because a novel promises a sense of ending. And then there are novels which do not end, which means that these novels are just poetry and should be treated as such. Which just reaffirms that poetry is a tough nut.
But when you manage to break into it, poetry reveals its beauty. Poems become transparent—we are able to see what the poet sees, and how he sees it, or a very close approximation of what/how he must have seen it.
The trick is that poetry can be deceptively complex. They look complicated, but beneath that they are just saying things which are usual, like this poem by Hass about the fox.
Because yesterday morning from the steamy window
we saw a pair of red foxes across the creek
eating the last windfall apples in the rain—
they looked up at us with their green eyes
long enough to symbolize the wakefulness of living things
and then went back to eating—\