. h e w n

Reply to the Question: “How can You Become a Poet?”

take the leaf of a tree
trace its exact shape

the outside edges
and inner lines
memorize the way it is fastened to the twig

(and how the twig arches from the branch)

how it springs forth in April
how it is panoplied in July

by late August
crumple it in your hand
so that you smell its end-of-summer sadness

chew its woody stem
listen to its autumn rattle

watch it as it atomizes in the November air

then in winter
when there is no leaf left

     invent one

Eve Merriam

The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse.  Her reverie, once rich in plausible details, had become a passing silliness before the hard mass of the actual.  It was difficult to come back.  Come back, her sister used to whisper when she woke her from a bad dream.  Briony had lost her godly power of creation, but it was only at this moment of return that the loss became evident; part of a daydream’s enticement was the illusion that she was helpless before its logic: forced by international rivalry to compete at the highest level among the world’s finest and to accept the challenges that came with preeminence in her field—her field of nettle slashing—driven to push beyond her limits to assuage the roaring crowd, and to be the best, and, most importantly, unique.  But of course, it had all been her—by her and about her—and now she was back in the world, not one she could make, but the one that had made her, and she felt herself shrinking under the early evening sky.  She was weary of being outdoors, but she was not ready to go in.  Was that really all there was in life, indoors or out?  Wasn’t there somewhere else for people to go?  She turned her back on the island temple and wandered slowly over the perfect lawn the rabbits had made, toward the bridge.  In front of her, illuminated by the lowering sun, was a cloud of insects, each one bobbing randomly, as though fixed on an invisible elastic string—a mysterious courtship dance, or sheer insect exuberance that defied her to find a meaning.  In a spirit of mutinous resistance, she climbed the steep grassy slope to the bridge, and when she stood on the driveway, she decided she would stay there and wait until something significant happened to her.  This was the challenge she was putting to existence—she would not stir, not for dinner, not even for her mother calling her in.  She would simply wait on the bridge, calm and obstinate, until events, real events, not her own fantasies, rose to her challenge, and dispelled her insignificance.

- Ian McEwan, Atonement

“Come again, she asked? Yes tomorrow, under the sodium street lights, under the tick of the clock. Under my obligations, my history, my fears, this now. This fizzy, giddy all consuming now. I will not let time lie to me. I will not listen to dead voices or unborn pain. ‘What if?’ has no power against ‘What if not?” The not of you is unbearable. I must have you. Let them prate, those scorn-eyed anti-romantics. Love is not the oil and I am not the machine. Love is you and here I am. Now.”

- Jeanette Winterson, The World and Other Places