In the early 2000s, she could be found standing in the middle of the sunroom, double doors flung wide, sunlight pouring in, a determined breeze doing its level best to undo everything she was trying to accomplish.

She persisted.

One sheet of paper at a time, she laid her poems across the floor, pinning each page beneath one foot until she could reach for a nearby rock, a knick-knack, a paperweight—whatever happened to be within arm's length—to keep the wind from carrying the words away before they were ready.

In this way, she built a white-papered road.

It began in the sunroom, wandered down the hallway, and eventually spilled into the living room.

At the time, I thought I was spreading pages across the floor looking for a book.

Turns out, I was making a map.

I didn't know it because I was standing in the middle of it.

And then the winds of time did what winds do.

They scattered everything.

Twenty-some years later, I began searching again.

I searched my laptop and desktop. I flew into the clouds to see what I had stored there. I Googled myself to find out whether I still existed in some forgotten corner of the web. I opened filing cabinets, drawers, and boxes to see whether the writer I remembered had survived the years.

The wonderful surprise was discovering that she had.

I had never really stopped writing.

Work had simply become louder than the writing for a time.

So something unexpected happened.

The poet who had recently written Wildflowers met the poet who had once written Beauty Questions the Diver.

The newer poems appeared while the older ones still echoed in memory, and each began illuminating the other. Themes emerged that I could never have recognized while standing inside them.

Take water, for instance.

The surprising thing wasn't that water kept appearing throughout the years.

It was that my relationship with water had changed.

The younger narrator often approached it as something to survive, descend into, or surrender to. The older narrator found language floating there instead.

The poems themselves charted that transformation.

Without realizing it, they had already become the spine of a chappy, strappy little book.

Twenty years ago, I believed I was laying pages across the floor trying to discover where the poems belonged.

Now I think I was arranging them exactly as they needed to be arranged.

Somewhere between that sunroom, down the hallway, and into the living room—while my coffee cooled on a nearby table—I discovered that my thoughts needed room to travel before they could settle.

It wasn't simply an editing technique.

It was a kind of topographical memory.

The poems didn't merely occupy pages.

They occupied space.

The floor of yesteryear wasn't clutter.

It was my first table of contents.

I still stomp around now and then.

What's a poet without a little inner angst?

But I'd like to think that if I printed all those pages today, they wouldn't need rocks or knick-knacks or paddywacks to hold them down.

They'd stay because they'd want to.

Or better yet ...

... they'd dance.