A Note to Hayden Carruth from Miami

Here, where orchids scent our evenings
and the sapodilla drops its spotted fruit,
gray, gritty, sweet, I raise a glass
of the “poet’s cheap, insufficient chardonnay”
and salute your freezing northern nights,

your days in the muddy slop of springtime
when trillium unfurls its delicate tongue,
where skunk cabbage unwinds in the icy bog,
and bleeding heart trembles in Isabel’s garden.
We’ve never met and probably never will

except in the imagined land of green things
beyond your daughter’s death, beyond folly,
beyond fame, beyond indignation and pain,
toasting the first life in small things
fresh from the earth with their tentative yes.


From PATH, CROOKED PATH (Copper Canyon Press, 2006)