A WRITER

A small, crystalline image of what it means to be a writer—to set beside Goffstein's luminous portrait of An Artist. "A writer sits on her couch, holding an idea,/ until it's time to set words upon paper,/to cut, prune, plan, and shape them." Setting words on paper, the writer stands at a desk; cutting, pruning, etc., she's recumbent, in thought. The writer, we hear, is a gardener—"never sure of her ground, or of which seeds are rooting there." In gentle, spare watercolors, we see a slender tree, a few pansy blossoms, "two small green leaves close to the soil. Two tiny sentinels, in the bare earth—yet "If a rabbit eats them, she's not mad at him. She knows more will grow." There is nothing fey or precious here. The writer sits over coffee and cookies with a friend; she sits at a typewriter—in a return to the central imagery—"hoping her books/will spread the seeds of ideas." A sense of discipline joins a wish to beguile.