Yesterday I copied out poems. I wonder if you might like to see what I saw.

from Walking Home from "The Duchess of Malfi"
Gary Snyder 

Months in the cabin: rain,
          cold, hard floor, leaking roof
          beautiful walls and windows--
                      feeding birds

from Of Michelangelo, His Question
John Haines

Muscular night stands over Persia;
once more the whirlwind sweeps
the dark-tongued leaves
to the lap of a woman so old
she is a child who cannot remember
when her book of the marvelous
came unthreaded
and the pages were scattered.

from The Rain's Consort
Brigit Pegeen Kelly

So, the lion, so his stiff wings, so the black moss that stains
Both his mouth and his wings, moss the color of fruit blood,
Or of pity, pity for the self that labors and labors
And spins only the wind, bride of the wind, oh foolish one.

What struck me as I copied out these poems? The supple power of poets whose hands reach unerringly for the tools that a particular poem requires. In these examples, for instance--

Snyder's subtle control of the white space around a burst of simple images 

Haines's clean grammatical turns as they swiftly sketch not only a character but also a setting and a history 

Kelly's single strangely placed comma at the beginning of her poem; how its sonic oddity gives birth to a dense, mysterious, almost mythic vision of a static moment

And I, too, want to be the hand that does these things so well. I want to be the hand that holds the brush, the mind that does not prompt the hand, the hand that paints without prompting, the idea that is only in action, the action that is thought, the thought that is the paint shining on the page.