Some days I’d like to believe that the most important thing in all the world (well, in my world anyway) is the poem I’m working on—my current one, the one that’s fresh and full of potential, still moldable and tweakable. I’ve got a couple right now that I wrote over the last few days. I may be talking on the phone with the online bank manager or taking a shower, walking in the meadow or watching Crossing Jordan on TV, but I can feel them circling around back there in my head, arranging and rearranging themselves. I go to the computer several times a day to pull them up, read through them, read them aloud, pull a word out here or there, switch another one out, shift the line breaks. When I’ve got a new version I like I print them out on a fresh sheet of paper and set them on the desk.

 There’s been a large red-tailed hawk circling around the house and immediate area the last few days. Sometimes I only catch the enormous shadow of his wings out of the corner of my eye. Just now I watched as he (or she) took a few turns right outside the window, seemed to have something in his sights, but then let the wind carry him away with no reward for his efforts. It feels that way with poems sometimes. I’ll have an inspiration that, in the moment, lyrically sings its way into my head. I write it down and it appears beautifully on the page, so fresh and authentic. In the moments, hours and days following I never take my eyes off of it, hover over it, nursing and encouraging it along, even though at times it may lose all of its luster, seem dull and unwilling to accurately portray the illumination of my original thoughts. More often than not, I must move on to another poem, let this one go, admit that it’s either not ever going to make the grade or that it needs time to mature, come of age, before I can embrace it fully and take it all the way home.

As for the two new poems presently on the table next to my left elbow—I am encouraged. They are coming along nicely, without any major hang-ups to wrestle with at this time. They’ve still got to go through the gauntlet of the workshop and being honed to the point of submission (that’s submission for publishing, of course). Time will tell. Tomorrow the forecast is for thunderstorms. Perhaps there’ll be a new poem there; in the lightening, the rain, the movement of the clouds in the sky. It’s not mine to ordain. The poem, just like the red-tailed hawk, glides into sight on its own clock, shows itself fleetingly. If you don’t look up in that moment, if you don’t grasp it in your heart with passionate adoration, it simply moves on over the trees, out of sight.
 

Rock and Hawk

Here is a symbol in which
Many high tragic thoughts
Watch their own eyes.

This gray rock, standing tall
On the headland, where the seawind
Lets no tree grow,

Earthquake-proved, and signatured
By ages of storms: on its peak
A falcon has perched.

I think, here is your emblem
To hang in the future sky;
Not the cross, not the hive,

But this; bright power, dark peace;
Fierce consciousness joined with final
Disinterestedness;

Life with calm death; the falcon’s
Realists eyes and act
Married to the massive

Mysticism of stone,
Which failure cannot cast down
Nor success make proud.

 
Robinson Jeffers
Selected Poems
Vintage Books, Publishers