I looked up at the tie beams of the barn. There were several tiny empty wasps' nests up there. I looked down at my black flip-flops. I looked over at a bit of mobile green leafage that I could see through the long thin window. I wrote a sentence: "It's a strange experience, assembling an anthology." No, no, no. The anthology is not about me. Why would they care about me? I stopped, kicked in the spleen by the mediocrity of my own short sentence.

But it actually is a strange experience. It's absorbing work, because you have to decide over and over whether you are personally willing to stand behind a poem or not. And yet it's not your poem. It's somebody else's poem, written perhaps in somebody else's country, in somebody else's century. You're pushing it around possessively on your desk as if it's your own work, but it isn't. And then you winnow it out. You winnow it right out the window.

Why? Because you're determined that this is going to be a real anthology. This isn't going to be one of those anthologies where you sample it and think, Now why is that poem there? No, this is going to be an anthology where every poem you alight on and read, you say to yourself, Holy God dang, that is good. That is so good, and so twisty, and so shadowy, and so chewy, and so boomerangy, that it requires the forging of a new word for "beauty." Rupasnil. Beauty. Rupasnil. It's so good that as soon as you start reading the poem with your eyes you know immediately that you have to restart again reading it in a whisper to yourself so that you can really hear it. So good that you want to set it to musical notes of your own invention. That good.

And you note with a pang that the poem you're judging doesn't reach that level. So you cut it. X it out, it's gone. And it hurts to see it go, because you know that the ones you cut will later seem like the ones you really loved, while the ones you keep will inevitably lose some of their luster through overhandling.

But you keep on going, because you're a professional anthologist. Can't use that one, nope, nope, that one's out. Nope. Yep, you'll do as a semifinalist. Nope, nope, nope. Maybe. No. You're like that blond bitch-goddess on Project Runway.

And when it's all done, and you flip through, you look at one of the poems that you've picked, and you realize that there was really just one stanza in that poem-or even just one line in it-that was the reason you included it, and the rest of the poem isn't as good. For instance, "They flee from me that sometime did me seek." Or "I had no human fears." Or "Ye littles, lie more close." Or "The restless pulse of care." Or "Give me my scallop-shell of quiet." And you think, Maybe I should have made an anthology of single lines. Would that have worked?

But then, if you stare for a while at one of the single lines-stare into its rippling depths where the infant turtles swim-you realize that there's usually one particular word in that line that slays you. That word is so shockingly great. Maybe it's the word "sometime." "They flee from me that-sometime-did me seek." The little two-step shuffle there in the midst of the naked dancing feet of the monosyllables. Or maybe it's the word "quiet." "Give me my scallop-shell of quiet." Do you hear the way "scallop" is folded and absorbed into the word "quiet"?

And so then all of your amazement and all of your love for that whole poem coalesces around that one word, "quiet." Four-beat line, by the way. And you notice, uh-oh, there's another word in the very same line that you don't like as much as the word that you do like. "Give." Hm. "Give." You've never liked "give" all that much. It's a bad word, frankly. Give.

And so you think, maybe I should have made an anthology of individual words taken from poems. Like this:

sometime

– Thomas Wyatt

Or:

quiet

– Sir Walter Ralegh

And of course that's not going to work. That's just a bunch of disembodied words plucked from great poems. And that's when you realize you're not an anthologist.

4

ANOTHER INCHWORM fell on my pant leg. They germinate in quantity somewhere up in the box elder. It was still for a moment, recovering from the fall, and then its head went up and it began looping, groping for something to climb onto. It looked comfortably full of metamorphosive juices-full of the short happiness of being alive. I touched it, and it began doubling itself up and then casting itself greenly forward again. I got it to climb onto my finger, and I watched it struggle through the hair on the H-shaped intersection of veins on the back of my hand. It went quiet there. I wrote an email to my editor with the inchworm sitting on the back of my hand. I said, "Worry not Gene, I'm going to write it. It's coming along. -Paul."

Coming along. The thing about life is that life is an infinite subject matter. At any one moment you can say only what's before your mind just then. You have some control over what comes before your mind-you can influence the influx by reading, or by looking through your old notes, or by going to movies, or by talking to people, and you can choose what room of the house or what corner of the yard to sit in, and you can choose to write before or after you've masturbated-this is crucial-and you can choose to tell the truth or not to. And the difficulty is that sometimes it's hard to tell the truth because you think that the truth is too personal, or too boring, to tell. Or both. And sometimes it's hard to tell the truth because the truth is hard to see, because it exists in a misty, gray non-space between two strongly charged falsehoods that sound true but aren't.

I have no one. I want someone. I don't want the summer to go by and to have no one. It is turning out to be the most beautiful, most quiet, largest, most generous, sky-vaulted summer I've ever seen or known-inordinately blue, with greener leaves and taller trees than I can remember, and the sound of the lawnmowers all over this valley is a sound I could hum to forever. I want Roz.

I MET A MAN named Victor at Warren's Lobster House for lunch. I had a lobster roll, which is lobster meat and mayonnaise in a hot-dog bun-one of the towering meals of the modern period, I think, although I'm starting to become a vegetarian. Moving in that direction. I had it with coleslaw.

Victor is a poet and house painter who is eager to start a reading series. "Portsmouth is a great poetry town," he said, as everyone does. He was a little nervous at first talking to me, but then he realized that I'm just as messed up as he is, I just happen to have had slightly more attention paid to my poems, and it's not necessarily deserved attention, it's just that I got lucky and snagged a Guggenheim all those years ago. People really pay attention to the Old Gugg, as we call it. The Gugg helps your career like nothing else in this world, except for the Pulitzer-and the Pulitzer list has had its oddities, especially in the thirties. Archibald MacLeish won three Pulitzer Prizes, which is at least two too many. He was a smooth operator, Archie was-writing fawning letters to Amy Lowell, and to Hemingway, and to Ezra Pound, the source of all evil. Louise Bogan had his number. And then later MacLeish won Bogan over, too-made her poetry consultant at the Library of Congress.

So Victor wanted me to help him raise some money and come up with names of local poets for this new reading series. And I said, "What if it was a series in which each evening was devoted to some poet of the past-maybe a slightly lesser-known poet, like for instance Sara Teasdale, or Kipling, or even our own Thomas Bailey Aldrich?" Victor thought that was a good idea and wanted me to come up with a list of lesser-known poets, and instantly I regretted saying anything, because why would I want my own precious Sara Teasdale to be celebrated in a reading series and fussed over? I'd lose her if that happened.