A voice came back to me on the street; I’d call it a voice, but there was no noise. It was more like an idea generated externally that made itself manifest to me. It was that confidence, that grace, that I’ve since come to know so well; it was Wallace Stevens’s idea of poetry, what he called “sounds passing through sudden rightnesses.” The sounds passing through sudden rightnesses were Duchess Goldblatt, and the idea that she brought to me was: “You will bear it. You have to. You will.” My heart calmed itself down, and I thought: Yes. Okay. I have to. I will.
