Dear C

Can I lure you back in touch, even if only voice to voice squeezed into wires that travel as you so memorably wrote under miles and miles of sleeping birds’ feet? Do you remember the high reaches of Point Reyes we walked and how the grass sparkled, frenzied by the wind striking

the headland, almost pushing us back down the path, while the wild irises bowed but didn’t break? And the day we drove the width of California to walk Limantour at sunset and pause on the beach at an empty seal, flattened on the sand?

All I can remember about the inn in Inverness where we ate is the bread and wine, how adding a single-celled fungus yeast to dough and grapes yields bread and wine, how mixing an animal thing with a vegetable makes a third.

Making a mix like that together could transform speechlessness into sound, but your silence has grown longer and longer. Sometimes it breaks as if a stranger were raking the grass, raking up leaves fallen off the ash into asymmetrical pillows.

After more than three decades of friendship, remember turning thirty, forty, fifty, and how many of the dates we celebrated with poems and raucousness? Sometimes silence feels like an easy truce between your madness to reel in and my madness to reel out,

and now we’re in an empty field waving white handkerchiefs at each other over a great distance. Sometimes, I confess, the emptiness feels like ground so parched even the worms have died. Remember how, sleeping slightly, I’d wake to tell you one-second dreams in Death Valley,

and the thunder egg we found laid by the thunder chicken that brings the rains to the land where we met, driving aimlessly like feathers on wind through forests in wetness and mists, talking, never idling, never stalling.

I’ve forgotten how we freed the falcon in your back yard stuck between the fence and a bush. Wasn’t it strangely easy, despite its desperate flapping, how with no hesitation or wounds, we helped it fly away?