Clairefontaine

My beautiful new Clairefontaine. I love its black cover, its thick white pages, and the generosity of its wide lines. I have bought so many that I will never run out at the rate I write.

But I write nothing, and come to my new Clairefontaine without a word or thought. I’m old, I’m tired, my right foot hurts. Whatever sense of well-being I had has dispersed. I am alone.

Everything I write becomes diary. In other words, everything becomes myself. Here in my Clairefontaine, and everywhere else. What would my writing become in relationship?

Why must every day be a struggle? I still want to become the poet I am not. I have sat in the same spot, at the same desk, for thirty years, writing in my Clairefontaine. I walk on sore, swollen feet.

“Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints,” Thomas Merton wrote, “they never succeed in being themselves.”

I am crowded with expectations, anxieties, and wants. There is no way into my heart. My first expectation or want—that a poem should appear. A poem, then, becomes a result, and not a gift. I am learning that I must become spiritually ready for nothing to occur, as I continue writing here.