I finished a solid second draft of the poem I've been trying to write about my visitor. I think it's almost there, but I've got some tweaking to do today, primarily involving how I present the complex banality of moral assumptions . . . for it's too easy for someone like the speaker of the poem to draw a neat circle around "problem" and "solution," yet it's also the only way in which she can frame the issue, given her observer status. There's an analogy, here, I think, between trying to imagine pain one hasn't experienced and actually experiencing that excruciating pain. No amount of sympathy is going to teach you what pain feels like. Only the pain itself can do that.

As I stand back from this whole situation--by which I mean the visit, the anecdote of the visit, the poeticizing of the visit, and the moral entanglements of actual response and storytelling response--I begin to feel as if I've been presented with a sort of gift-challenge: one that has forced me into dual action--in the moment, after the moment. Something out there is telling me, "You need subject matter? I'll give you subject matter." And also: "This is why poetry matters. So don't do a shitty job."