I've been more or less awake since 3 a.m., which I'm not entirely blaming on worries about the election. There was also a clatter of rain on the roof and, eventually, an obstreperous cat, not to mention the irritation of Sheena Easton's wretched "For Your Eyes Only" looping through my skull. As a result, here I sit in the living room, drinking black coffee and trying to replace the night rubble with cleansing thoughts about Middlemarch and the poem I finished yesterday.

And the poem does make me happy, if for no other reason than it serves as proof of the elasticity of a reading life. I began the poem with a four-word trigger: words I'd chosen at random from a volume of George Herbert's poetry. But as the draft pulsed down the page, I began to hear something within it that sounded like another poet altogether. Quickly I figured out that I was hearing Dante . . . or, more accurately, Seamus Heaney's translation of the opening canto. I had not read that canto lately, had not been thinking of Dante's or Heaney's work, but that did not stop my brain from taking the Inferno off the shelf and brushing the dust into my draft.

* * *

What could I answer except, "I come"?
I said it, flushed a little with that color
that makes a man worthy, sometimes, of pardon. 

--from Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio, translated by W. S. Merwin