(For Jean and Nick)
You cannot imagine a more delightful visit. Writing to write, not so much to make a living--which is social work if you can get it--but writing to make good on life, can be lonesome, and the writer, all you know anyway, aches to share the writing with others and in particular other writers since they know by the brow the brutal labor it takes to sit still before a plain page in a plain room and face your proprietor, your landlord of words who gives and takes, at times
as if by whim, no purpose, yet leaving you with the rent to pay, the duty to get something from nothing and on a skillful day order from chaos, what Wallace Stevens still calls the blessed rage for order in a poem surviving his genius.
Because of all this, your visit with two writers in the neighborhood is unimaginable delight for you and your single regret is letting your desire show. The writing neighbors treat you to a tea ceremony of their own and welcome you with such warmth you are at home from the start. Somehow they seem to abide your passion for being there in that room that is not so much plain as lived in and ordered, in the same glance. The sharing is from just the right place where you sit glorious, gleams of light making the room entire glisten, or it may be the gold sun striking the walls at an angle never seen by you, this being a first visit.
On the way to the visit that you want not to forget, it was so stunning, so you write it, you get wet. In one direction the walk to the house of writers is short and would be to the point but Little Professor calls for you as you are waiting to walk and the book you've waited for, the one just in the hands of booksellers a small time since it is just now published, The Book Against God by James Wood, was in. You decided for that direction because besides the book sought, you had in your hands a letter and a poem to your mentor for a day, many years ago, Theophane Boyd, also known as Theophane the Monk, and you wanted very much to post the matters of faith for you had not thought of Theophane since the day you met and the thought you held in your hand, thoughts wrapped in plain brown paper, you wanted him to hold in his empty mind and walk with in his rickety way, for he is very old, well, older than your old self.
On the way for all this you get sopping wet because you walk in the rain. You have a suitable umbrella but the day is filled with just wind enough for
the showers to shift, the way summer rain can do in these parts and bathe the
walker in the very drops of becoming, should the walker have a mind for it and decide to walk with rain. That's not the whole truth of this though. You happen to be wearing a pair of white slacks and naturally they bear most the bare drops so they get wet as well and if you do not take care to wear your shirt on the outside your underside will show bare. You arrive for the visit reasonably re-constructed as you drop by your house to change the slacks. On entering the sanctuary of your writer neighbors, you remove your cover shirt and take off your loafers and step gently onto holy ground.
As you write the visit
you listen attuned to the grand
noise of the horses running in
mud and you know well how they must
feel and you listen just well enough to hear
the results and so you add here the grand finish.
No Triple Crown
(For Funny Cide)
So large of spirit
quick drama like quicksilver
a wee point in time
Another empire
wins the race to the finish
yet your drama lives
Bless your funny name
and too your benefactors
who lost a bundle
