The way I learned to write was only in letters. So, my poetry collects as odes
to clouds,
secret messages to little blades of grass, and letters
to Susan Who is Far Away. A letter to everything
all around me.

I lean to describing everything
back to itself -- even sights I have not seen, places I have not visited, the way I would imagine writing home from Morocco --

sending over the wires telegrams,
sending you over smells of chickpeas, red peppers,
sparrows flying through brushfire,
shadows treading cavern walls.
All my eyes a love letter.
I will see it for two, and it will
be twice as much

-- and so forth. As well it helps to be outside. Notebook pages become incandescent (here meaning: lit from within) and there are circles of crows, wings beating and palpitating. Gross heavy banks of clouds slide to the north, bellies mushed up against the top of the mountains. I see it, I see it; but how to get it? How to understand. How to keep going.

Sometimes writing about writing works (such as now). Or reflecting, remembering, looking again and again. Trying to bring back helicopters in huddling winds; bees speaking their dances on the windows.

The same window view in November:

boxers sparring in the cold,
transferred to
prose.

Faces shadowed, concealing
brightest sweat which
I cannot see, but am sure
is there.