Dear Maxine Kumin,
You make me want to be a poet.
The humble sort, the kind that plasters her words on the back of a syllabus
and embraces them,
poised and reflective.
A mirror in shards.
I imagine words floating to you in waves. You
could catch them in a butterfly net and dump the
contents on sheets of thick paper;
so I figured it’d only be appropriate
to write to you in a poem. But this is no
sonnet or structured sort of thing, these are
my silver strings of words—for you.
I write to you from Haverford College,
a quirky place polluted with pollen
and rather curious squirrels,
with more strangers than I’ve ever known,
yet I’ve never belonged more in my life—
here on an impulsive whim to do something.
So I read your poetry.
I study Philosophy, Dear
Maxine Kumin, and the stock
market, and improv comedy,
and how leaves drop dead in fall,
and the way the world is in constant motion—
at battle with only itself.
I’m fascinated by art that is intangible
but near and warm and demanding,
and I want to be a writer someday.
These days,
I type my thoughts in bold
(Dear Maxine Kumin, is it still writing
if there’s no paper?). I wonder
what it is about geography or physics
that binds us to our earth.
I think about rivers all the time,
how I miss the ambiance of hardware stores
and gas stations that make my eyes feel blurred
in their fluorescent escapade—
all sorts of silly little things.
But I write to you, Dear Maxine Kumin,
because I need to tell you that I can taste it—
I can taste love like you asked in your poetry
and I still taste love.
It’s metal and mint gum and it seeps
into the pocket under my tongue
when I write in cursive—
which I wholeheartedly believe is a dying artform—
or when I sit under what my friends call a Havertree
or in a carroll at the library where the walls are lined
with photography books,
when it’s cool and sunny and the sky is bare and blue,
when I remember November as a child,
when I think about the world before I had a cell phone,
and when I read your poetry,
Dear Maxine Kumin, I taste it too.
But we don’t talk about it, you and I,
we don’t talk about the ways we love the world,
just hold them in our palate like hard candy, examine their
sharp roundness on blank backgrounds; these are the words
left unsaid
in our collective literary analysis,
the ways we grapple with our humanity—
so it must be your words
moving me where I cannot speak,
words that cannot be felt in my mouth,
on my tongue, in my teeth,
but where fragments of truth
are all I need to make sense of the world.
I’ll think of you, Dear Maxine Kumin,
the next time a penny finds me heads up.
How lucky we are to live in a world
where there is poetry.
Yours,
Alex
