Can something be Prose and Poetry?

Sometimes when I'm reading short stories or novels, I find passages that are truly poetic. They have the kind of perfect wording and emotional content that I expect from and associate with poetry, and so I think of them in that way. I've been known to describe prose works by saying they are like poetry.

So... Are they? Can something be both? Can an author have written poetry outside of a poem, (or even a prose poem)?

My dictionary's definition of a poem is:

"literary work in which special intensity is given to the expression of feelings and ideas by the use of distinctive style and rhythm"

I think this fits.

Here's some examples of sections of novels that I believe to be poetry.

“Who has never killed an hour? Not casually or without thought, but carefully: a premeditated murder of minutes. The violence comes from a combination of giving up, not caring, and a resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish. So you kill the hour. You do not work, you do not read, you do not dayream. If you sleep it is not because you need to sleep. And when at last it is over, there is no evidence: no weapon, no blood, and no body. The only clue might be the shadows beneath your eyes or a terribly thin line near the corner of your mouth indicating something has been suffered, that in the privacy of your life you have lost something and the loss is too empty to share.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

"A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth. For example: Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast, but it's a killer grenade and everybody dies anyway. Before they die, though, one of the dead guys says, 'The fuck you do that for?' and the jumper says, 'Story of my life, man' and other guys starts to smile but he's dead. That's a true war story that never happened."

-Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried.

So why would these be poems?

The passage from House of Leaves incorporates all kinds of poetic language. An hour is personified as someone who can be murdered. There is alliteration, "murder of minutes" and repetition, "you do not" and "no weapon, no blood, and no body." Most importantly, it makes you feel the emotion he speaks of. You are pulled along through these words and images, the metaphor established that, at times, wasting time makes you feel as guilty or blank as killing someone. It's powerful and shocking, and poetic. The conclusion lets this emptiness set in, and as a reader you can reach this emotional realization.

In The Things They Carried I find this passage particularly powerful. It is part of a larger discussion on how to tell a true war story. This section uses colloquial language as its voice, as if written by the soldiers that it concerns. There are short lines, showing the simplicity and quickness of death in war. It is not flashy; it's sudden and blunt. These sentences create rhythm. It also incorporates lies, as he says that the soldiers have time to discuss their deaths right before it. The very idea of a "true story that never happened" is poetic. That's what poetry is. We tell true stories, whether or not they actually happened, in the hopes of communicating that truth. I think that's what he's done here.

What do you all think? Too much of a stretch, or can prose be poetry?