this is fact not fiction...

I've realized tonight, as I was looking through some of my books of poems, that it has been entirely too long since I've actually sat down and read poetry. And what's worse, it has been nearly a month since I've written a poem, even longer since I've written one I can actually say that I almost like. Nearly this whole summer I wrote nothing. I hate this feeling. I hate loving poetry so much and not making time to read it, let alone write it. I can't really call myself a poet if I never read or write. I'm like a man who calls himself a carpenter imagining shelves in his mind but never touching a single nail or piece of wood.

********************

One of the masters, in my mind:

The Rescue
~Seamus Heaney

In drifts of sleep I came upon you
Buried to your waste in snow.
You reached your arms out: I came to
Like water in a dream of thaw.


from Squarings
~Heaney

xlviii
Strange how things in the offing, once they're sensed,
Convert to things foreknown;
And how what's come upon is manifest

Only in light of what has been gone through.
Seventh heaven may be
The whole truth of a sixth sense come to pass.

At any rate, when light breaks over me
The way it did on the road beyond Coleraine
Where wind got saltier, the sky more hurried

And silver lamé shivered on the Bann
Out in mid-channel between the painted poles,
That day I'll be in step with what escaped me.