7.24.22

You told me that your poems seem to be concerned with a central question: how to be with you? 

In response, I think that my poems have been concerned with: how to be here? 

I think often of the epitaph from Jim Harrison's Dalva: "we loved the earth, but could not stay." 

Maybe we are preoccupied with togetherness, both of us having experienced a shared separation. 

It seems to me that I lived my childhood three times. Once with my grandparents in China, a second time with in that house with the orange tree behind it, and then a third walking through the streets of Los Angeles alone. 

Is it the destiny of children to remember their childhood in the midst of living it? 

Most of all, I remember the early mornings and early evenings. How many nights did I sit alone in that city with the wind blowing all around me? The wisteria on the porch blooming down at me. I've spent so much time gathering wisdom, getting ready to live. Is it the fate of adults to be preoccupied with wisdom, thinking it will protect them from everything that's already happened?

And now - am I living? And now - am I wise?