A reader in France e-mailed me a question recently: "What do you do when words desert you?"

That’s a very different question than, "How do you deal with writer’s block?"

Often a block is temporary, and can be dissolved once the cause is identified.

Losing your words is much scarier, because the situation feels like a second shadow, and the voice that speaks to you over and over sounds suspiciously like your own. “Forget about writing again," it whispers with soft insistence. "You never really had the gift of poetry to start with. That was a fluke, an illusion."

Don’t let that mockingbird fool you.

If you listen, it will flood your mind with its chatter. It will follow you from room to room and build nests in the backyard. Once that happens, it will attack anyone – or anything – that approaches.

Shoo the annoying bird away – no matter how loud it squawks – and then the cat hiding under the bushes can emerge.

Poetry often disguises itself that way, sitting so still that you almost miss it, except for the occasional flick of the tail or a tiny half-meow that says, “Feed me.”

If you’ve ignored poetry for a while, or it seems to have ignored you, then the cat may be in someone else’s yard, and you need to go find it.

Once you do, the feline will test your devotion, just as art will, circling a bit closer each time, but always remaining slightly out of reach. “How badly do you want me?” is the unspoken question both ask.

That’s what happened to me last summer, when I was trying to reclaim my poetry after months – years, really – of estrangement.

I had to relearn the rule of cats. Don’t pursue them, coax them.

In my case, the teacher was a white and orange feline that I happened to notice as I was walking down the street one day. The cat was sitting on the lawn of a large, prim white house that stands next door to a small, slouching cream house.

I said hello to the little sphinx, which ran toward me, and then backed away when I stuck out my hand.

When he approached again, I could see how very thin he was, with bald patches on his head and neck.

“You could be a beautiful creature,” I told him. But that would mean my feeding him every day – since no one else was, obviously – and sitting on the edge of the lawn every night, until he trusted me enough to let me look at his wounds.

“How badly do you want me?” was the nightly challenge.

Poetry asks the same thing, with a twist. “Do you want me enough to believe in your own abilities? Will you trust your silent center, rather than all those other voices?”

Those are difficult questions, especially if the world – or the face in the mirror – has convinced you that you have nothing valuable or new to say.

If you answer in the affirmative, though, poetry, like that cat, will assert its authority. It will allow you to lounge on the lawn one night, and make you sit in the middle of the sidewalk the next, even though you’re attracting the neighbors’ attention.

I can’t tell you how foolish I felt, sitting two or three feet away from the road as car after car sped by.

Night after night a local man walked past me, on his way back from some secret destination. He would stop and ask the same questions:

“Is the cat a boy or a girl?”

“A boy,” I’d answer.

“What’s her name?”

"I don't know."

A four-year-old girl who lives in the cream-colored house often came outside with questions of her own. One evening, she wanted me to see her pink princess blanket. The two of us – and the cat – sat on the blanket on that dirty strip of pavement and acted as if the situation were perfectly normal.

That’s what poetry asks us to do – to outgrow our hesitancy and disbelief, our paralyzing self-consciousness.

That’s when the words return. They insist on following you home, just as that orange-and-white stray finally did.

I named him Rumi, by the way, after the great mystic poet.