Roz called and said she'd be by at about six-thirty. I knew she would-she misses the dog like crazy, and who can blame her? I got out some chips and salsa and was sitting in the white plastic chair by the barn door when she drove up. I watched her walk up the driveway, looking very calm and elegant in her dog-washing outfit of jeans and a loose blue shirt with a paint splash on the sleeve. She stopped and said hello to Smacko and picked up something in the sand. I heard her bracelets jingle, a sound I hadn't heard in a while. "Here's a present from the driveway," she said, and she handed it to me. It was a fragment of old china with very fine rule-lines in blue against white. Bits of old china sometimes appear in the driveway as rains wash more of its sand away. I took off my glasses to look at it and thanked her. Then I offered her a chip.

We washed the dog and didn't get too wet, and then she said she had to go. I asked her if maybe she'd like to stay and watch Bull Durham with me. She likes Bull Durham.

"Is it done?" she asked, meaning the introduction.

"It is not done. Nor will it ever be done, for I am not the one to do it."

"Oh, poof," she said. "You just need to apply yourself."

She didn't leave right away, at least. She smiled at the tablecloth. On it was my paperback of Mary Oliver's New and Selected Poems, Volume 1-I seem to be carrying it around the house with me. "So that's what she looks like," Roz said, tilting her head to see the picture on the cover better. It's the blue-tinted photograph in which Mary is wearing some kind of wonderful ulster with a zippered hood, and she's looking off, and she looks heartstoppingly French. "She's beautiful," Roz said. "Is that a recent picture?"

She's about seventy now, I said, and living in Province-town.

"Is she lesbian?"

I said I believed she was, yes.

"It's odd that the woman I most want to look like is a lesbian," she said. Then she said a long goodbye to Smacko and we hugged ceremonially and she drove away.

I didn't want to watch Bull Durham, so I watched three episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show. Three's about my limit for one night.

GENE'S NEW EMAIL says that they're becoming "really concerned." I feel horrible about it. I don't want to disappoint him. Gene, I'm sorry. I apologize for this inexcusable slowness.

If I could just die and rot in the ground it would be okay. I wouldn't have to write anything more. Die and rot and be completely dead. No worries. Everything's good. "Paul Chowder was at work on an anthology of rhyming poetry when he died." "Ah, too bad."

The best use of the word "rot" that I can think of is from a poem by Coventry Patmore. He's sitting in a bay. He's just had some reversal, we're not sure what. The ocean and its waves are out there. He looks at them. What kind of ocean is it? It's a "purposeless, glad ocean." That's what first caught me, those two words, "purposeless" and "glad," placed together. But then comes the next stanza, which is a killer. Suddenly he raises his voice and he says, "The lie shall rot."

When all its work is done, the lie shall rot;

The truth is great, and shall prevail,

When none cares whether it prevail or not.

I know I'll never write anything anywhere near as good as that eight-line poem by Coventry Patmore. Which is in many, many anthologies. I've sailed past fifty and I've had my chances and it hasn't happened.

But there's still the hope that leaps. There's still the tiny possibility. You think: One more poem. You think: There will be some as yet ungathered anthology of American poetry. It will be the anthology that people will tote around with them on subways thirty-five, forty years from now. There will be many new names in its table of contents-poets who are only children now, or aren't known. And you think: Maybe this very poem I write today will somehow pry open a space in that future anthology and maybe it will drop into position and root itself there.

I guess that probably explains why I used to collect anthologies. I was hoping to find a crack in the pavement where my ailanthus of a poem could take root.

IT WAS ABOUT MIDNIGHT and misty after another brief rain. I wanted to sit in the white plastic chair by the driveway and admire the overboiled potato of the moon, but I knew that the basin of the chair would be filled with water. So I tipped the chair forward, in the dark, with the crickets going, and I could hear a splash as the water poured into the grass. I hesitated for an instant, wondering whether it was worth my while to sit myself down in the wet chair and get my pants wet. And my answer was immediately yes. Of course I wanted to sit in the wet chair. No sacrifice is too great. And meanwhile the mist came up the hill and a wild turkey was peeling out a great crazy screeching cry down by the creek. He's lost, or he's lost someone, or he's having an argument or an orgasm. I'm breathing the same mist that the turkey screeched into-the same mist that has boiled away the moon.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw a firefly inscribe part of a curve, and I remembered W. S. Merwin's poem "To The Corner of the Eye." I thought: It is so, so good to know that W. S. Merwin exists. I even love his initials. W. and S.-ideal initials. Merwin writes poems that, fortunately, I can't remember. They would be exceedingly difficult to memorize. But imagine being the poetry editor, maybe at The New Yorker, getting "To the Corner of the Eye" in the mail and reading it. Imagine how thrilledly shaken up you would feel at reading it and knowing that you had the power to publish it. Although come to think of it, "To the Corner of the Eye" wasn't published in The New Yorker.

Then, in the mist, I saw a big man walking up the street. He was wearing one shoe. He had a familiar look, so I got out of my chair and went partway down the driveway, and I waved at him. It's not usual, really, for people to walk up and down my street without two shoes on at midnight. He stopped. He put his hand on the telephone pole that's there. He looked down. And then he looked over at me. He was a big guy. Big strong bald head. Wide nose. Kind of a defiant, wild, defeated look. I said, "Ted? Ted Roethke? Is that you?" And he nodded slightly. I said, "Wow, Ted, how's it going? You look like you just got hit with a couple hundred million volts of electricity."

"No, it's hydrotherapy," he said. " 'I do not laugh, I do not cry; / I'm sweating out the will to die.'"

"Whoa, Ted," I said. "Sounds a little like Dr. Seuss, except dark. You want to come in and maybe make a phone call to a loved one?"

He shook his head no. I went back to my chair and sat down. The mist came and went. In ten minutes, a car pulled up behind him, and a man got out and led him into the car, and they drove away.

I went inside, and I got in bed next to some anthologies and W. S. Merwin's The Vixen and slept quite well.

W. S. MERWIN SAID his mother read poetry to him. Well, mine did, too. Several times my mother read me Shelley's poem "Ozymandias." Percy Shelley, played by William Shatner, is riding in some caravan across a mental desert, and he comes to two enormous carved ankles and calves that tower above him. "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair," say the words carved into the pedestal, in some lost language. Carl Orff's Carmina Burana is playing its great hollow choral chords in the background, as it always does.

My mother came to the last line. She read, "The lone and level sands stretch far away." Present tense. An instance, there, of the necessary compression and deformation of speech: "lone" doesn't quite make sense. Shelley had in mind the isolated, the forlorn, the lonely, ruined, sandy scene-but the meter called for one syllable, and so he wrote "lone," which is perfect. Lone and level.