This poem is called measure - I think it belongs to my learning as a young writer as to where I felt poems were coming from.

Measure

 

Recurrences.
Coppery light hesitates
again in the small-leaved

Japanese plum. Summer
and sunset, the peace
of the writing desk

and the habitual peace
of writing, these things
form an order I only

belong to in the idleness
of attention. Last light
rims the blue mountain

and I almost glimpse
what I was born to,
not so much in the sunlight

or the plum tree
as in the pulse
that forms these lines.

from Field Guide (Yale University Press, 1973), © Robert Hass 1973, used by permission of Yale University Press. Poetry Foundation recording made on 19 October 2007, New York.

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