Letter to Max

When we open a bookstore all the glimmering erased will be lampshades. No one will wear sunglasses. We will have a section arranged by neck length, a section arranged by spine color even though mine in the Ct anyway is the boring red/yellow hodgepodge conveying bupkis. They say small talk before the question, so what about pain? Was singing the solution or the absolution? I am thinking of the unspecified, the poor margins, settled with a shrug and a dissertation on jazz drummers, not the conga kind, but the little kit on a big stage where saxophonists blew so fiercely we called them Rabbit and Fathead. Once I hit a bird and when I checked it was a green darner. It’s wings still zipped. I don’t know if it remained a dragonfly, or if together we became something new. So now what? A horse can be but one thing. This book, full of you, once stood in the Baltimore County Public Library. I paid pennies though poems are not as they say alive. But to think you wrote it to my waiting and now I slice at your words with a pen knife like an antique philatelist. You had great press for a 25-year-old, though we’d all rather be unknown at 30. They say many things about patience which turn out to be untrue. If I could hear you sing it would help. I don’t believe you that metal is like a father, but glass may be our only mother. I will meditate on this and report back. What of all who still consider you? Who send you postcards and letters addressed to Max? Does meanness matter? So many questions when really I’m just waiting to be staked the way angry scientists railroad butterflies.