I spent some time yesterday afternoon copying out a few Hayden Carruth poems, working to reorient myself within the thought-landscape of poetry. The cadences under my fingers; the grammatical peace; the hairpin turns of lyric and narration, anger and pleasure: the experience of copying out those three poems was so satisfying that I wonder why I haven't done more of it lately.

In "Particularity" Carruth laments, "How it is blurring, oozing / slowly away from / me. This is an / awful moment / / every time." The lines evoke both the withdrawals of aging and the imaginative drought of the creator. The speaker is left with "only this invisible / hereness where I am," "the center of mystery," the flicker in the oil lamp.

The gift of the poem is the way in which it does not say, "I am almost dead."