Poetry

What is it that characterizes a piece of writing as poetic?  Where does it cross the line from merely descriptive into a categorization of art?

What is "almost poetic"?

When do the words stop being merely relative tools of communication to become allusions to sublimity?  Or beauty?

Hm- I guess "the poetic" is descriptive then... descriptive of something arbitrary within that cavity, something that words can't describe anyway, but we try to, and then we consider it "poetic".  Ah.  I guess that's it.  Words that attempt to describe what words cannot describe.  And I guess that it just so happens that much of poetry is rhythmic because the human soul owns its own rhythm, and words emulate it in form where functional definitions fail.