When my work is not my own

It's not a thinking up, she wrote --
It's more a getting down,
a taking of dictation.

Ah, yes, that's it, I think,
and wonder if you'll ever understand;
if instead of seeing the holiness
of this approach,
you will assume that I'm some idiot savant,
a Mozart to your Salieri:
awkward, too loud, never quite the thing --
and yet the music somehow tumbles through me,
an insult to the wise and stylish world in which we live.

And yet -- I, too, within myself,
must daily reconcile the intellectual and the child,
as every artist asks herself -- how much of this is me, and mine,
and how much is simply grace,
flowing through onto the canvas or the page?
I have to assume the parts that work
could never be my own, but just
some happy accident, in which I briefly served as vehicle
for someone else's vision.