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25 f r o m s c r a p w o o d m a n t h e s e w i n t e r s k i e s Once in the middle of love for a woman. She is going away for three months, telling me not to worry. I am weeping, waiting for her to come back from the city where she is a lover of another, with her fidelity to two, country mouse and city mouse. I do not want to be a hermit, though I do want more moments of clear perception that living alone brings. She says there is no way to control any of this. We lie down with our shoes off. This is the way we clean house, inside a fierce, changing music. I am growing old and still delight to learn something out of an encyclopedia. I have a confused heart and no set aesthetic. There are dances I have never tried, lounging in a scrounge of watchfulness, with no private life, more a mid-region like a theatre auditorium or a restaurant, where I perform in the aisles and then the parking lot. These winter skies, I can almost imagine living with one of them, inside the buckling we call kneeling, with evening birdbits distributing themselves. Seedsound in a cold diamond, the superb ache when a few hours of writing begin. I would like to hear what you have escaped, how you slipped free from some compulsion or inherited conditioning. What moves your story along? Tangents, errands, resupply. Desire, absence of desire, partial fulfillment. Galway Kinnell says that, at seventy-seven, desire is still to him the most beautiful thing. I would rather some fluency come, usefulness and a longed-for spontaneity. Robert Graves to the very end was writing love poems for his muses, women with muse-potential, always on the lookout for new ones. I have heard people dismiss those late love poems as silly, not appropriate for the elder, the great shaman. But it is those poems that feel most alive to me, unburdened by thought, so lightly set loose, a tissue, barely there. ...

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