Whence Poems?

My poems live amid the woods
Beneath the eaves of trees
Along the line around my lawn.
They watch me make my bed beneath the darkening sky
And one by one, decide, stepping out, to find a writer and be written.

I lost the art of paper, grip of pen,
And am obliged to rise and go to my computer.
Before the keyboard I am a man returned
From a mountain with a fist full of snow:
Cold and wet are not the same.
How to get the grandeur of that poem,
What it was before it came to me,
Before I wrote down something like it,
And put up on my study wall a thing
To be read, remembered, forgotten by me alone?
By stubbornness I take it up again.
Hammering, I smith and forge a casket for the creature;
Ornate, glittering, yet lacking the life
Which looked out from the trees
And watched me.