I called Roz and told her about the reading in Cambridge. She said she wished she could come, but she couldn't. I asked her how things were going. She said she was busy. I asked her if she missed me at all, at any time of the day or night. "Some, yes," she said. I thought that was a good sign.

WHEN SHOULD I give the beads to her? Maybe wait? Maybe give her the gift of not having to occupy her mind with my obvious wish to woo her back? Once when we were first going out she gave me a really big blue umbrella with about a hundred red cartoon monkeys on it. I left it on the train and then a man holding a cellphone ran after me and said, "I think you left this on the train." So I still have it.

What would Aphra Behn advise me to do? Aphra Behn understood love. She was the first woman in England to live by her writing. People set her love poems to music. She spied in Holland for the king, and then the king didn't pay her. She was always making love into a person: "Love in fantastic triumph sat," she wrote, "While bleeding hearts around him flowed."

Victorian women didn't like Aphra Behn. Back in the 1880s, there was a New Hampshire writer, Kate Sanborn, who published an interesting book on women's humor. She called it The Wit of Women. It cost me forty dollars to buy it from a dealer in Wellesley. "Aphra Behn," Sanborn said, "is remembered only to be despised for her vulgarity. She was an undoubted wit, and was never dull, but so wicked and coarse that she forfeited all right to fame." Why did they hate her so much-just because she wrote a quick poem about a seduction on a riverbank?

Let's pack it up. I've packed another two boxes. Here's a poetry packing tip for you. Make two load-bearing stacks or towers of books in two diagonally opposite corners of the box. The two stacks must go right up to the top edge of the box. That way it won't crumple and slump-you can pile boxes four or five high, and the weight of the top box will be transmitted down through the two stacks of the one below and the one below that.

13

I STARTED TO GET SLEEPY in the middle of the afternoon, so I went out and mowed half the lawn. That always wakes me up. And as I mowed, I thought, The interesting thing is that you can start mowing anywhere. The lawn will get done no matter where you start mowing. And that seemed like an important discovery.

Because so often I think when I'm writing a poem that I need to start in some specific spot. Where I begin becomes so important that I never begin. I've been trying to write a poem about a time when Roz wore a pair of white pants.

I walked upstairs behind her

Staring at her stitched seams

Normally she wore black pants

But it was the last day of the year

That she could wear the white ones

So she did

Haaaaahhhh! I'm going to oxygenate myself. Haaaaaaahhhh!

You can start anywhere. That's the thing about starting. If you start, you're in motion. If you don't start, you're nowhere. If you stop, you're nowhere. I have reached a crisis where I don't know where to start. It's arbitrary. I could start with sunlight on clapboards, because is there anything more beautiful than sunlight on clapboards? A strange word: "clapboards." It's one of those interestingly wrong words- it sounds flabby, like clabbered milk, when it's talking about something cleanly edged.

I wish I were happy in a disciplined way. Happy in a nondespairing way. I wish that I could spill forth the wisdom of twenty years of reading and writing poetry. But I'm not sure I can. I've published poems, yes. That much is beyond question. And for a while I was pleased with the poems that I published. I felt that I understood why people write poetry. I understood the whole communal activity of writing and reviewing and extracting quotes to go on the paperback. "Moss has arrived, with next to no luggage, at mastery." Being part of the interfaith blurb universe.

And now it's like I'm on some infinitely tall ladder. You know the way old aluminum ladders have that texture, that kind of not-too-appealing roughness of texture, and that kind of cold gray color? I'm clinging to this telescoping ladder that leads up into the blinding blue. The world is somewhere very far below. I don't know how I got here. It's a mystery. When I look up I see people climbing, rung by rung. I see Jorie Graham, I see Billy Collins, I see Ted Kooser. They're all clinging to the ladder, too. And above them, I see Auden, Kunitz. Whoa, way up there. Samuel Daniel. Sara Teasdale. Herrick. Tiny figures, clambering, clinging. The wind comes over, whssssew, and it's cold, and the ladder vibrates, and I feel very exposed and high up. Off to one side there's Helen Vendler, in her trusty dirigible, filming our ascent. And I look down, and there are many people behind me. They're hurrying up to where I am. They're twenty-three-year-old energetic climbing creatures in their anoraks and goggles, and I'm trying to keep climbing. But my hands are cold and going numb. My arms are tired to tremblement. It's freezing, and it's lonely, and there's nobody to talk to. And what if I just let go? What if I just loosened my grip, and fell to one side, and just-fffshhhooooow. Let go.

Would that be such a bad thing?

I RAN OVER A ROCK with the lawnmower, now my lawn-mower is broken. It doesn't start and I've bent the propeller shaft, which is something I can't fix, so that's two hundred dollars to the repair place, where they also sell baby chickens. And bags of chickenfeed. All this money is being swept from me. A faint breath of money somehow appears, a mist of money. I breathe it out into the air, and immediately it's sucked away by those who have entered into elaborate agreements with me that I haven't read.

I can do five chin-ups now, and I'm going to be helping my friend Tim out with painting his house. He's putting in a new door in back and painting the whole house a deep blue-black, and I'm going to make maybe fifteen hundred dollars helping him scrape and paint. Which means I'll be fine for next month, financially. He says that Haffner College won't have me back to teach writing. They are so right not to have me back.

Elizabeth Bishop wrote: "I am so sick of Poetry as Big Business I don't know what to do." None of the good poets believed in teaching. Auden said it was dangerous. Philip Larkin said that when you start paying people to write poems and paying people to read them you remove the "element of compulsive contact." Too bad Larkin's poems are so killingly down-bringing. I can't bear Larkin, not because he isn't a very good poet-he is a very good poet-but because anytime I get anywhere near him it's poison, I don't want to go on living. His acid is just too corrosive. I can't read his poems, but I can remember reading them with amazed undelight whenever I read his prose. So his poetry is still working on me indirectly.

Late in the afternoon I was talking to Tim on the phone about Queen Victoria when I heard a huge buzzing in the window. I said, "Tim, excuse me, I've got to go investigate this huge buzzing insect." I hung up and looked at it.

It was a waspy sort of creature with a long tubular abdomen that carried a herringbone pattern in yellow. Something that resembled a hypodermic syringe poked out its back end. I called Roz right away. I said, "I'm sorry to bother you, but remember that insect that you told me about once with the long herringbone abdomen?"

"Yes," she said.

I said, "It's on the windowsill in the dining room. It's got a huge long pointy thing hanging off its end and the point has snagged a strand of dust and it is so big that at first glance I thought it was two wasps mating."

"I know that one," she said.

"Do you know what it's called? I was thinking of writing something about it."