Juvenilia Waters

And every night I’d settle into bed
or sit myself under the table lamp
to carve another poem in my black
book with the faint blue lines traversing it,
each neat consecutive undrafted find
entered spontaneously, numbered, dated, signed:
a splendid casual arrogance of will
coupled with some evidence of unfolding skill —

those improvised enjambments where an impulse rowed
and rhymed and divided, ultimately caught
up with its logic or resolved its part
while all along a theme or thread cajoled,
cavorted, sank, or blandly transformed
itself; made drunken by that first flush of art.