A month or so ago I told you I'd just learned I was a finalist for a major poetry prize, to be announced early this fall. No news, as far as that goes: I still don't know the results of the competition. What has struck me as odd, however, is that for most of this summer I have forgotten to think about this contest. Till the other day, I more or less forgot I was in the running.

Given that this is the biggest competition I've ever placed in, such a lapse in awareness puzzles but also intrigues me. I could chalk it up to the increasing craziness of our daily lives, the ceaseless bombardment of insanity and fear. I could link it to the struggles in my creative life, a life that seems to be too busy floundering in its private time-space quagmire to acknowledge any success beyond grabbing the occasional vine or root. I suppose the trigger for forgetting doesn't much matter, but in some way the very fact of inadvertent indifference makes me wonder, again, about the purpose of art to the artist--not my present-tense need to communicate but the purpose of my art over the long haul . . . the past-to-future road.

It's not a road that's easy to see.