Our cottage is on the east side of the lake, with a lot of big trees, so it takes the sun a long time to hit us. Yesterday, sun reflected pink off the clouds, the clouds reflected in the lake. All this reflected in my eyes, which got in a sense reflected by my brain into concepts, language. So I am playing with the word reflection.
Reflection is from Late Latin reflexionem "a reflection," literally "a bending back. The lake allows a bending back, even when it’s wavy. To look into it awhile is to look back at your thoughts.
And reflex, what happens without thinking about it much. A natural, one might say original, movement of body and mind.
So, I was working on this poem which was “about” my birthday. I started it last winter, and thought to save the draft until my actual birthday this summer, to see what else I might want to do with it. I’d been reading Albert Goldbarth, which always encourages my dumping a lot of interesting but seemingly unrelated stuff into the works to see how it will all come out. I looked up the day of my birth. I put in the failure of the German Resistance, the 7,000 Jews arrested, the 1200 sent on a death march, my father in the Philippines drinking from a cocoanut that fell and broke open, his silly letters home. Then coming forward I put the first moon landing, And my birthday parties here at the lake. And last year, when I didn’t yet know I had cancer. That fact, of course, lands in any poem like a bomb.
It’s not the material that makes a poem. We all know that. I gave my draft to my two best intrepid readers, who both told me, “Lovely language, but I think it’s a prose poem.” I thought about why they said that, which brought me to the ticklish issue of what makes a poem a poem, and not prose, or a prose poem. It’s not line breaks. I had those. It’s not lovely language. Apparently I’d achieved that. It’s not a clear thread of meaning. A law brief does that. 
Poetry, we ought to know if we don’t, is a way of seeing. It can’t be faked (although many try) and it can’t be willed or wiled into being. But I’m pretty sure it can be driven into being by failure. We stub our toe enough times against the words, the feeling we had when we wrote the words, and a singing, comes out. It may be a song of pain, but at least it’ll be a song.
This is good advice for me. I’m glad I just wrote that to you. I look back at this draft I have to the side of me here and see that whatever elemental thing drove me to write about my birthday is still hiding behind cleverness and facts. Why did I start this poem? Because I was in the middle of chemo, or radiation, probably, and wouldn’t that make you reflective about your birthdays? Wouldn’t it make your heart hurt but not want to reflect that, because you have to be brave just now?
My poor husband has seen me come down for lunch many times after a morning of working, my head hanging in despair, my mood sour with failure. I’m used to failure. I’ve been a writer for a lot of years. The act of writing itself is a persistent failure to accurately reflect what we feel and see and know in the heart. Because understanding has no language. As soon as we impress language upon that understanding, we’ve broken it apart. All language can do is point in the direction of understanding. 
I won’t show you these sad drafts because that seems to harden them into place. If I get what feels like a poem, I’ll show you. Why am I writing this post and not working on the poem? Good question. Maybe this is part of the mysterious process of writing the poem. Or maybe I’m ducking the hard work.
My little desk at the cottage does not face a window. The lake’s too pretty out there. I need to use the wall in front of me as a lake, let it bend back to me my own hopeless thoughts until something emerges I can work with.