Recently, I read a few essays from Thom Gunn’s “The Occasions of Poetry,” and this is what stuck:

“A few years ago, I found myself preoccupied by certain related concepts I wanted to write about.  They arose from matters real and imaginary so closely tangled with my life that it was impossible, for the time being, to isolate them as a poem.  They were a familiar enough association of ideas, it’s true– trust, openness, acceptance, innocence– but I felt them all the more vividly and personally the more signally I failed to get them into poems.  Well, I knew by now that the thing to do was not to strain, I’d just have to go on living with the values, watering them, hardening them, getting them bushy with the detail of experience, until their flowering presented itself to me as a given fact.  In what sense you might say that innocence can be repossessed, I wondered, and started on yet another sterile poem playing with the figure of a house being repossessed– and if there is on thing innocence is clearly not, it is a house.”

The resulting poem, Three, is actually lovely and exists without trace of a house repossessed– I was able to find (thanks, Google!) a copy of it in a 1995 San Francisco Chronicle article, though, of course, the formatting’s all off.  Sorry.  Imagine quatrains.