What does Benjamin mean when he speaks of opportunity?

One way of thinking about

the concept of opportunity is as a kind of perception. But what does it take for one to
see an opportunity for action? In some sense, walking by a restaurant when hungry is
an opportunity, but this is a weak sense of the word. The opportunity did not reveal
anything to me, I could have known in advance that going to a restaurant will satisfy my
hunger. This is why seeing a restaurant in that case is not so much seeing an
opportunity, as inferring one from seeing a restaurant. To really see an opportunity
means that I cannot distinguish between my desire and what I see. It is not, on the one
hand, a mere projection of my desire on objective perception, nor is it an inference from
an objective empirical fact. The first option emphasizes the subject, the second the
object. An opportunity, like making a joke or scoring a goal, cannot be described in
these terms. Scoring a goal, for instance, is not seeing something and then inferring that
it is adequate to my desire to score, since it is impossible to say according to what rule
was this inference made. So we could say that there is no rule that connects perception
and desire here, that I simply see that this fulfills my desire. Here perception is no
longer neutral empirical perception, but it speaks to me, the world somehow responds to
my desire.
What would this mean for the poet? Mainly, I think, that any empirical fact concerning
himself is inessential for the description of the poetic event. Surely his memory and
experience play a part in the event, but they add nothing to the explanation of why he
found this situation to be fortuitous above all others. Only in the situation, and not in his
mind, does he discover what he ought to do, and it is only for him that this situation is
an opportunity.
The situation is a space of possible actions, and the poet comes to determine this
space. While these possibilities are infinite, they are still limited - not everything is
possible. The poetic action, its plasticity, has the form of this limitation. We might think of

a good joke, and it gathers the situation to which it refers and shows us what it was
hiding from us. Not unconscious wishes, but the conditions of possibility for that
situation to take place. This is the form, or limitation, of the situation (A condition of
possibility is always a limitation which opens up an infinite space). The opportunity is
already giving form to situation through the function of the poet, this form being the
explication of a limit.
This is how I believe we should view the plastic. It is a form, but an intensive one, not
the product of a construction. But why is the intervention of the poet thought of as a
temporal moment? Maybe Benjamin is giving us a hint when he says that the function of
the poet is not something laid-out. What is laid-out, (for instance the carpet, or the
situation [lage]) is what we can isolate, point to. But the act of laying out of such, the act
of gathering into unity, must be thought of as what has duration, as that which is other
from that which is gathered.