It's one degree above zero, outside in the icy dark. Here in the little house the furnace growls and clicks, and lamplight spreads a golden circle in the gloom. I'm in my accustomed place: the corner of the grey couch, with my white coffee cup, my black coffee, my red bathrobe. Upstairs Tom is still asleep. Beside me, the fair-haired cat squints and purrs.

I'm thinking about patience, and suddenly wondering how different it is from impatience. Sitting quietly, waiting for opportunity, slogging away at tedium: are they all a mask for desperation? a way to deceive the Watcher? Or is true patience simply indolence? or indifference?

I've been rereading Kate O'Brien's The Land of Spices, which is set in an Irish convent school just before the First World War, and I'm sure that's why I've found myself circling around these questions of inner wildness, exterior self-control. Poems, of course, are a place to frame that conflict. A certain sort of nun might be able to construct other versions of that frame. Perhaps she would employ the word obedience, or vocation. A poet might as well.

A vocation does require obedience: a strict adherence to the rules of the game . . . a game that is demanding and particular and generalized and ancient and mutable and unfair and exhaustive and extremely unclear. Perhaps you see why I've found myself conflating patience with impatience.

Being a poet is a lesson in being no one. Yes, in the Keatsian sense of negative capability--a constant striving to thin the barriers separating self, language, and experience. Yes, in the sense of isolation. The essential work can only be done alone. Yes, in the sense of communal joy. Nearly everyone is indifferent to a poet's striving: even other poets are indifferent.

Invisibility is freedom. Freedom is dangerous. Danger heightens the senses. The senses are liars. Lying is power. Power is invisible.