Writers get blocked sometimes. That’s only because we’re struggling, grasping to connect ideas and words with precision. The ideas are sometimes bigger than us at the moment we sit to write them. We wrestle with the angel. We spar with the muse. It seldom comes out right the first time. But we still go in, we do battle and somewhere in our wanderings, deleted sentences, and scratch outs, we come to meet some awesome truth hidden from us in plain sight.

Archaic Torso of Apollo

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

-Rainer Maria Rilke