Last night, as we were driving home from our writing group, a friend said, "You wrote some great drafts tonight." I'm glad she thought so, of course, but I'm also intrigued that these pieces arrived in the midst of a dry period: they are the first poem-like words I've written for weeks.

Dry periods can be distressing, and over the years I've moaned about them repeatedly on this blog: what if I never write again? what if this is it for me? weep weep, wail wail, etc. But as I noted to you yesterday, I've been unfazed by my current drought. In fact, it's almost been a relief, this absence of internal pressure to produce poems. Surely, much of that is linked to the sudden busyness of my public poet life. But  maybe I've suddenly (and probably temporarily) shed the fear that I need to prove myself. Maybe I've reached a landing on the stairs, one where I can pause and hum to myself I'm a poet. I write poems. Just not today.

Perhaps that seems like a small shift, but I've spent a lifetime talking to myself in the interrogative: am I a poet? do I write poems? why not today? I don't think this internal goad has been all bad. Probably it's been necessary. In family lore, I was the lazy child, the sloppy child, the child not living up to her potential, the child least likely to be able to take care of herself. I suppose most of us exist among such myths, and they become part of the way we learn to navigate ourselves: repudiating them, embracing them, wrestling with them, using them. As I interrogate my laziness, my sloppiness, I also interrogate my ambition. How much do I really want to do this thing I claim I want to do?

I daresay I'll return to such questionings soon enough. Yet even in my current plain state of mind, I don't feel any less ambitious about making better and better poems. I just don't feel urgent. I don't have a sense that the poems are running away from me if I don't write write write write. I wonder if they are simply slipping into my life via a different door.