Driving this morning, a poem came to me,
so simple, so pure Keats himself could not conceive it,
and then, turning onto Lombard Street, I lost it.

My first novel, five years in the writing, lept
like an antelope, but it was stolen from our back porch.
To preserve it, I have never written another.

Things are not as good as they were. But that's not the surprise
this mediocre winter Thursday evening
with its ticking radiators and fireplace odors.

The miracle is that I can still remember how the sky opened
once or twice, and a thousand feathers rocked down.
I make my X here to mark where it happened.

Think of how, in the San Francisco earthquake,
William Keith watched his 2,000 landscapes
flame orange, then die to rubies, then to ashes.

The next day he started to repaint them
in praise of what he'd lost. In praise of going on.