I count in my head and have for as long as I can remember. When I swim in Long Pond in the summer, I count 20 strokes breathing to the right, then switch, 20 to the left. When I cut carrots for salad I count the chops of the knife — one, two, three, four, five. I memorize the numbers on license plates of cars in front of me. I count the holes I poke in the dirt with my finger, getting ready to plant beans. I count stitches as I knit. I track my runs and walks and bike rides with an app on my phone then write down the distance on my calendar. I count my inhales and exhales when I meditate, when I hold a pose during yoga.

What does this say about me? That I’m a poet who pays attention to the rhythms in my life? One summer several years ago I wrote 14 sonnets, because a sonnet has 14 lines and I wanted to create the symmetry of 14 x 14. Working in the traditional form, I counted beats in the lines. I spent much of the summer tapping with my fingers as I moved through my day repeating lines from the poems in my head, working to get each line to ten syllables of iambic pentameter. I can’t write a poem without some order to the number of lines in each stanza. Really, I can’t. If a poem just won’t take that shape, I take out the stanza breaks and let the poem run on.

What does that say about me? I like order but I also like disorder. Writing a poem orders the world and also enters the disordered perceptions that make up a moment, roaming among the associations that make meaning of a collection of words. Adherence to a form, even if it’s a form I’m imposing rather than a traditional sonnet or sestina or villanelle or triolet, makes me work harder to make the sense make sense.

I think. And now I’ve counted these words and I’m at the number I’ve decided I’m going to write each day for these two weeks. So I’m done.

.

The window is black, a mirror of my morning, messy hair, dark glasses, the white light of the Apple logo on my computer the brightest spot in the reflection.

This is how I start, describing what I see — the sky, trees, the old silo on the horizon, a bluebird, a crow, the last johnny jump-up in the garden. Then I try to stretch the image to mean more than it says. That’s what poetry is, for me, pulling words past themselves, layering meaning so an image creates associations that reverberate in unexpected directions. I usually give some direction in my poems, a thread of narrative to help pull the reader along the arc of language, sometimes more directly than others. But there have to be leaps, moments when the reader crosses over from a literal reading to a sense of something more and know that whether that something is exactly what I, the poet, meant doesn’t matter. I explode/inside my own brain, I want other brains/to explode. Another line from The Truth About Death.

Crafting images that speak for more than themselves in prose isn’t any more difficult in individual images, but learning to do it effectively across a much longer and more linear narrative, in a novel or memoir or even essay, is more difficult for me, mostly, I hope, because I’ve done so much less of it. But I’m learning.

And that’s something I’ve loved about the new life I’ve created since leaving full-time work. I left my job to write, imagining myself as a full-time writer, forgetting how much else I do – mother, partner, friend, daughter, sister, board member, hiker, triathlete, runner and especially absorbing, grandmother. My imagined future of hour upon hour at my desk and books pouring out of me hasn’t happened but I do write more than I did and what I’ve loved is learning to write better, especially in genres I’d only dabbled in before.

Last summer I studied novel writing at the Vermont College of Fine Arts Postgraduate Writers’ Conference (with Andre Dubus III who was a terrific teacher) and was the person in the room with the least experience writing fiction. I loved it.  When I was working, I was never the person in the room with the least experience, and often was the person with the most. I was the teacher, leader, boss, presenter.

Now I’m the student and it’s exhilarating. It’s a relief, to learn and not teach.