When we first came down here last summer--
well, I said we had gotten a house next door
to our old friends, Steve and Gail.
Steve, who unlike me--
I being satisfied to do absolutely nothing most
of the time--
Steve is someone who needs to be doing something all the time.
So he had decided, without knowing too much about how
to go about doing it, that he was
going to enclose his back porch and make a room out of it.
And my health wasn't that good at this point and I really
wanted to get out in the sunshine,
which was then about 110 degrees, and work with him,
but I didn't.
I just looked from my window and watched the walls slowly go up.
This poem is about that.
And it's about my arguments with myself, I guess, about writing.
"Tucson: A Poem about Wood, for Steve Orlen.
Jesus, the wind blew, hard, for the first time in ten hot days
tonight.
We opened windows and doors.
I tried to read.
I wished my son, three, was awake
so we could have perfectly talked.
I don't start to talk or read the way I start to write.
My best friend, who I'm gladdened to live alongside,
and three young men are enclosing his porch next door.
Four upright beams atop, then a window or space for it--
wood.
I would like to have helped that fragile, gathering shape,
especially to have hammered the frame that will hold glass,
but then I wouldn't have seen it, or my friends, working.
I write for something to do, so I do it; it tells me how I am
or it sometimes lies.
I hate it, I do it for pleasure, I'm not even part of it.
Though it's something like a frame and I see through it.
I see you carrying on.
I see the part of your labor that must be your pleasure."