Where It Went

Every time I go to my writing group, I feel like some sort of...well, not a sort of writing fake, just lame. I never have any work at all, not since finishing the book in July. I am never good with the times when writing is on hiatus.

There are times I wonder, even when it's silly, if the Muse is real and if I managed to offend mine somehow. I wrote tonight that my Muse, my goddess in the ether who directs my poetry and prose, is a sort of gypsy dressed in rags and tinsel, peacock feathers and sequins, with a touch of small dry bones, flecks of blood and shadow. What did I do to make her go away, slip under the transom of winter, leaving me stranded? I would like to go to the place where I scattered my lost sister's flowers in the autumn woods, make a ritual to the goddess, coax her back. I am always, I think, going to be one of those writers who struggles for every word.

Well, okay, that's a bit dramatic. I suppose I can say I'm hollowed still by grief, though the well is gradually filling again, but how incredibly gradual. There are times one has to trust even in times when words won't congeal into lines, lines won't congeal into poems. I have to trust that the poems, the stories, are waiting and will come back, maybe better than before. My lost sister understood this: when I began to act like a tiger pacing its cage, the writing was about to return. Now that she is not here to remind me of this, I have to, consciously, hoping this restlessness is a sign of rebirth, the goddess waving at me from the infinite dark.