It is fairly late at night and I am writing again for the first time in several weeks and I am thinking about poetry. I am thinking, too, about the year I was seven years old and my doctor told me I was going blind in my right eye. Yes, I am thinking about that, but I am thinking mostly about poetry and only a little about surgical "procedures" and about how everything these days is a "process." Everything, including poetry and the surgery that repaired my right eye, is movement toward something or, perhaps, away from something else.

I am thinking about poetry and I am afraid I am boring you, but it is getting very late at night and I am thinking about my medical examination this morning, and about the nurse who connected a dozen tapes to my chest and side and about her long red fingernails pressing down on the membrane that keyed instructions into the EKG. I did not watch the squiggle marks on the paper feeding out of the machine, but the sharp gleam of the nail polish and how she typed with the points of her nails.

When the doctor called later to tell me my heart was fine and my blood pressure was normal and my cholesterol was where it belonged and my prostate seemed normal and even my gall bladder (suspect organ) didn't have to join my right kidney in that place where body parts go when they are harmful and have to be ripped out, I thought then about poetry and about the process of semi-annual medical examinations that do not search for something, but for nothing, and about bright red fingernails.

To walk across the street is a dangerous thing, I thought, and to write a poem can also be dangerous. Writing the best poems must, I suspect, always be dangerous, as dangerous, at least, as crossing a street with our eyes closed. When I was seven years old and my doctor told me that I was going blind in my right eye, I went with my family to my grandmother's house in northern Florida . We drove from Southeast Texas as we did every summer and turned off Highway 98 onto a sand road that meandered through a wilderness until it stopped at a small bay off a larger bay. I did not think about poetry then, but the place was poetry and the place was dangerous.

The first morning I was there, I pushed a small wooden boat off the shore at Wakulla Beach and lay down in it, feeling my body rock with the low waves, and let the boat drift away from shore, my eyes closed in the hot sun. From time to time, I would open only my left eye and stare up at the clouds and wonder what it would be like to be blind in one eye, no longer to have depth perception. The boat drifted out of Wakulla Bay and into Appalachee Bay and by the time I sat up, and took the oars in my hands, I had no idea of where on that body of water I was.

At seven years old, alone in an old 12-foot, wooden boat, I dipped the oars into the water and stroked aimlessly in what might have been the direction of shore. Poetry is like this for me much of the time. I am alone in a large body of water and I put the oars in the locks and pull the water past me. It travels under the boat, the boat does not really move. For a poem to be good, to be worth writing, for me at least, it has to be like that and it does not matter where it comes from.

I am staying up very late tonight and I am thinking about poetry and I am thinking about myself when I was a small boy and was told that I was going blind. Poetry is dangerous, I think, if it is poetry worth doing. Poetry is risk taking, pushing yourself and your words out there into water so deep that a single wave can drown you.

I remember when that small boat drifted farther and farther out and I finally sat up and looked around and could not see land in any direction, only a faint smudge back in the direction I must have drifted from, I simply did not care. Someone would have found me after more time had passed, but I was lucky and the tide turned, washing in towards East Goose Creek and Wakulla Bay .

It is late and I am writing tonight for the first time in many weeks and I am thinking about those first moments when, as a young boy, I dipped the blades of my oars into silvery water and pulled the water under the boat, turning toward shore. That moment was poetry, that single moment of awareness, and though I did not write a poem that day, nor any day after that for many years, that day was itself a poem.

So, tonight, I am thinking about me when I was seven years old and about turning sixty on Sunday and about poetry and danger and surgery and blinded eyes and kidneys thrown into biomedical waste containers, but mostly I am thinking about poetry.