What a poet told me

Wyoming sunrise, 2013

I recalled what a poet had told me once: the eyes want to see at all times, he said, and so you have lids to rest them, but the mind, the mind wants to think and there is nothing to stop it, to give it peace and rest, not even sleep, and out of all this perpetual churning comes occasionally a sound from some unknown place and you must listen for it, listen for it like it’s a bird you wish to identify from its song, or a conversation on the far side of a thin wall in an unfamiliar hotel room and you wish to eavesdrop; it might have something to do with you. It was a difficult, draining, often unsatisfying, often fruitless task, this hyper-vigilance, but if one wished to live as a poet, this was part of one’s daily toil.