It’s as though it rains and the wind plays Beethoven’s piano sonatas in the leaves. In the woods each leaf, growing and rotting, contributes to the music— laurel, oak, madrone— and to name is to praise. But I’m not in the woods and it isn’t raining. Instead, I’m being practical at home. I have finished dinner and now I’m sitting on the toilet. This is what it means to be a poet. To tell the truth the way it seems.
5 September 1987