I finished a draft of a poem yesterday--a day when I should have been editing, but isn't that always the way? I rarely feel as if I'm doing what I ought to be doing. When I'm editing, I think I should be writing; when I'm picking peas, I think I should be dusting lamps. I wish I could flip the switch on whatever it is in my brain that keeps shouting, "Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!" But perhaps this is creation at work: the brain's purposeful misdirection, the second-guesses and mixed signals, the unfinished cul-de-sacs, the quarrelsome thickets draped with poison ivy, the old cellar holes and the straggly rhubarb plants by the vanished door--

As Frost writes in "Directive,"

The road there, if you'll let a guide direct you
Who only has at heart your getting lost,
May seem as if it should have been a quarry--