I'm soft. Far too soft. I'm not a good poet. Not really. The women are stronger, fiercer. Like Paula (or was it Pauline?) from the meetings. Volcanic lava of honesty. She'd always cry. Sob.  But you knew, you knew, she was healing herself. Naming the wound. I can't name my wounds.

I've seen poets, crazed furies, take stakes that have been driven into their hearts and pull them out with a mighty scream more thunderous than anything heaven can pound out. And somehow, somehow they let things settle and cool. And they make art. Immediate and real and scary and true.

I sing iambic lullabies to the ferns and lilies of April. I write my couplet to the spring, as Wallace Stevens said of Crispin. And yes, I quote Wallace Stevens. What is there to disturb the readerwho might need disturbing? Look, see this! A verbal sparkler! Pretty, isn't it? And here! Some pompoms and a pleated skirt. And look, over there: some Frostean portraiture of the colourful autumn leaves. Forsooth. Yea, verily.

Maybe I haven't had the traumas and rages, the pains and shames. But I have. I just don't want to write about them. Is that wrong? Is it evasion not to tell my story? Here comes another quote: "We must be as clear as our natural reticence allows us to be." Brooklyn's Presbyterian Confucius, Miss Marianne Moore. From somewhere in the collected prose.

But you know what ---

I suspect that if they have to be written about, they'll find their way in, those demons and ghosts, those lacerations of the soul.