I'll finish off with a few more gentle, easier poems.
This first one is a poem called "A Letter."
Called such because it began to be a letter to a friend.
It's dedicated to him, David Schloss, a poet who
was teaching in Cincinnati.
It's in four very short parts.
Again, it begins primarily imagistically
in the first part.
I'll just make a short pause before each one.
And clarifies itself by the end.
"A Letter."
I put my soul in a tin dish.
All night the possum laughed.
Next I put my brain in the tin dish, it was slick.
I put my brain in the tin dish, God awful.
I put my brain in the tin dish, the brain pan, the bowl.
I didn't want it.
One night, my hand became a tarantula,
but I kissed its head.
I put my mouth down in the dark fur,
turned it over, breathed into the warm belly of palm.
And such repose, David came over me.
But the other one, the hairless one, was a hand.
It shook in fear.
Now I have two hands, no intellect,
and each refuses to cut off the hated other.
Every year, I feel older.
It's normal, a task I don't love and haven't the time to hate.
Powerless now, I walk out.
And inarticulate, I breathe into the faces
of the undergraduates.
A girl said, Mr. Anderson, you know so much.
And I touched her.
But my good hand ran along my face, it's wilderness.
And David, but for love of you and some others, I'd give up.
You said, I can't find my life either.
It falls all winter.
It falls into your hair and your eyes, making them wet again.
The lost freshness for which we hurt ourselves and write
these letters.