WEBVTT

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I'll finish off with a few
more gentle, easier poems.

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This first one is a
poem called "A Letter."

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Called such because it began
to be a letter to a friend.

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It's dedicated to him,
David Schloss, a poet who

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was teaching in Cincinnati.

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It's in four very short parts.

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Again, it begins
primarily imagistically

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in the first part.

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I'll just make a short
pause before each one.

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And clarifies itself by the end.

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"A Letter."

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I put my soul in a tin dish.

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All night the possum laughed.

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Next I put my brain in the
tin dish, it was slick.

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I put my brain in the
tin dish, God awful.

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I put my brain in the tin
dish, the brain pan, the bowl.

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I didn't want it.

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One night, my hand
became a tarantula,

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but I kissed its head.

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I put my mouth down
in the dark fur,

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turned it over, breathed
into the warm belly of palm.

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And such repose,
David came over me.

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But the other one, the
hairless one, was a hand.

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It shook in fear.

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Now I have two
hands, no intellect,

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and each refuses to cut
off the hated other.

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Every year, I feel older.

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It's normal, a task I don't love
and haven't the time to hate.

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Powerless now, I walk out.

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And inarticulate, I
breathe into the faces

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of the undergraduates.

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A girl said, Mr. Anderson,
you know so much.

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And I touched her.

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But my good hand ran along
my face, it's wilderness.

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And David, but for love of you
and some others, I'd give up.

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You said, I can't
find my life either.

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It falls all winter.

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It falls into your hair and your
eyes, making them wet again.

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The lost freshness for which
we hurt ourselves and write

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these letters.

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