Every morning I’m up with the alarm at five, out of bed after two punches on the snooze button. I head for my study, and thus begins my writing time.  Most of the time I have no idea what I will be working on, or what I will do with this one or two hours. What never ceases to amaze me is that something always happens.

The muse is great, but I find that most of my attention is spent on just the words themselves–switching them out, switching them back. Playing with syntax or the sound of the line. This is fun to me once I get into it–like my own private crossword puzzle. And I know there was a famous writer who said that he might spend a whole day worrying over a comma, and at the end of the ordeal put the damn thing back in where it was to begin with.

This morning I was in the final stages of a poem–the point at which I can literally remember exactly why I chose one word over another. I can even remember how the poem used to be–what came frirst, what came last, where the original impulse is and if it reains in the final drafts. I’ll even take the poem away from my desk and bring it around ith me–in my gradebook if I am teaching, in the passenger seat of the car while I wait in carpool line. I feel like I will never get tired of staring at it, comparing this word against another to see which it best.

All this is remarkably like painting a room. I have lived in a new house for nearly two years now, and many walls are primed and ready for paint colors that I have yet to decide on. I feel like I should have some grand vision for the whole whouse before I take even a single step. I want everything to go well together, for the colors of each room to ‘flow’–I don’t even have a vocabu;ary for the way I want the paint in the house to look. I forced myself though, this week, to take a step–I would paint my sons’ bathroom white.

Have you ever been to a paint store? The walls are lined with bookmark-sized strips of colors with wonderful names–Concord Gray, Pensacola Mist, etc. For a while I used only paint colors that had an author’s name worked into the color–Hawthorne Red, for example, was an accent wall in a bedroom of long ago. The other half of the wall space is devoted to the whites–linen white, blue white, creame, parchment–pink, brown, beige versions of white. It is really impossible to make an informed choice. If I were a decorator I would buy samples and paint the wall many different whites, stare at the swatches at different hours of the day to get just the right look.

For a poem, I am willing to make that sort of sacrifice. Didn’t Bishop wait sixteen years for just the right word before she would declare her great poem “The Moose” completed?  For a bathroom, not so much. I chose Decorator’s White. I finished in one day, the brushes are soaking in the sink. For the next room, if I feel bold, I may choose beige.