The First Three Lines

The first line is written on a blank page, and the second line follows without any strain. I have completed what must happen first, and the rest will come forth with a kind of ease. Not the kind of ease you assume, when you set aside your tools, close your notebook, look away from the edifice you are building, and let your mind empty itself, become a hollow place, a chamber of swirling dust, where men arrive barely conscious and collapse in disarray, some never to rise. The third line is not yet written, but I am alert. I can already sense what its shape and colors, even what it will mean to me in later years when these memories will have slipped into a deeper memory: it will call forth the texture of its moment, the glance, the stare, the half-smile. Those are gestures which both hide and reveal what is essential to our being. That is why the third line will be empowered to pull the rest of the images into the poetic space and close the circle of inspiration for a time.