Then I lose myself. In the best part of the best day, absorbedness occupies me from footsole to skulltop. Hours or minutes or days—who cares?—lapse without signifying. When I have done as much as I can on the moment’s poem, I move to another. Depending on their lengths, I work on one poem or I work on five or even ten. At any moment when a poem does not occupy me wholly, when I feel impatient or discouraged or tired, I drop it quickly; after a while—one hour, three hours?—I feel the poetry-juices drying out. Instantly I stop; I put the poems away until the following morning.

Now I need to interrupt work with a chore. In the years before we installed an oil furnace, I carried logs from the woodshed to various stoves. Now I make another cup of coffee; or I take the mail out to the box. When I have dawdled a sufficient blank space after poetry-time, I am ready to move to prose. There’s a new children’s book that I’ve taken from my mother’s recollection of childhood Christmases; I do another draft, changing little things, wondering if the end is conclusive. There’s my book review of Tom Williams, third draft and fairly inchoate, which I trim here and expand there and revise sentence-by-sentence; this piece will take many drafts; I don’t know why. My essay on graveyards goes better; its second draft is further along than the fifth draft of the book review. There’s my proposal that local art agencies judge and sponsor publication of local writers in local newspapers. I make a new draft for each of these small endeavors. There is also Life Work; today I save it for later.

This morning, when I have worked over as much prose as I wish to, when I feel tired, it is 10:00 A.M. I’ve been up five and a half hours, and over the last four hours I have done my day’s work. It’s 10:00 A.M. and the rest of the day is gravy. If it’s gravy, it’s also a touch boring; through mid-day, through afternoon and evening until I go to sleep, I will look forward to tomorrow morning and the 6:00 A.M. desk. But I cannot fake it in the afternoon; if I push too hard, I become impatient and do bad work.

Ernest Hemingway makes a model of the good day:

When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again. You have started at six in the morning, say, and may go on until noon or be through before that. When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have made love to someone you love. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again. It is the wait until the next day that is hard to get through.