Letter to Richard Wilbur

Dear Richard

It is dawn here on a Saturday morning in Florida, where I'm never cold. I can write as now on my terrace in almost every weather. And I'm visited throughout the day by many birds and once by a fox who clambered up and who I fed and watched sunning himself as I typed. I was far away, in the deeps of the unconscious, vast and ablaze: in the morning it mirrors the fortunes of the world, and it's open -lighted like the Globe. I climb its sheerest face and stand before creation everlasting, unfolded in a circle about a single star. I can only stay a short time before surfacing in a stream. When I return, my wife is making lunch. I return at night when the house is asleep.

I find words in the dark for the use of which I'm prepared to fall and though I thought once that I sensed some shadow in a room where I'd stopped and worked all night , I know it's no one greater than myself in the mirror of another cosmos neighboring ours. It is the same poetry that connects the two.  It was a poem that was the singularity that strung galaxies like lyres, and in all poetry is a repair and inexhaustible tenderness identical to the one who reads.

Fingers of light appear when I'm finished working and my wife is awake, asks if I'd like to go out for coffee and I say certainly.