Dear Bob Dylan,

The year my father died I wrote an essay betraying his love for me and mine for him.  Yes, the valley of the mind bleeds, the spirit sweats, the heart beats like skipping stones.

There was a time before his death when I blanketed my thoughts and held my words.  I never told him how I felt or asked him how he felt.  Now I look with the eyes of a damp sun, bright and curious, sad with regret, at his little brown box of ashes, wishing I’d asked.  Wishing I’d said.

I sometimes feel that everything he possessed I have somehow lost.  It’s an effort to consider.  My father, I imagine is a very gentle ghost, swan colored, norwegian spruce scenting his travels.

Where is he now, I wonder?  Like the poem by Anatoly Steiger that asks:

Where is he now, I wonder?

And what’s his life like?

Don’t let me sit by the door

Expecting a sudden knock:

He will never come back.

Now, on a May night, I sit and think of you.  Of him.  Of my childhood.  Of him, I can remember plenty.  His great city of ideas, gone now in a cloud of dust.  Of my childhood, a kiss goodbye.  Of you, invisible guide to my fate-filled highway, where all the trees are immense, where my dreams are better than my memories, where twilight alters shapes into shadows and sunlight distorts my focus.  Where I walk under God.  Where I walk between laws, moral, political and incidentally otherwise. Where I fatten the scapegoat of my lies so I can get on more peacefully.

Everything works.  Everything makes a great story.  This rebellious body of mine, beginning its decline.  This great mind, regarding the possibilities.  My idealism, always different than what I expect.  One moment absent minded, the next all penetrating and focused.

And so, another ashen day is forming.  Or should I say, another detestable day full of long intervals and waiting.  I never mean to sound audacious.  You seem to me well-seasoned, not stubborn for nourishment like me.  You seem to me beyond madness, beyond what has happened and onto something else.  Not like me, starved for a new proposal, seeking understanding in anything that moves, then apologizing for being so aloof.

Sometimes love comes to us in degrees.  As if God believes, this is how much you can handle.

My father used to conceive of life on his own behalf.  I think God took him to teach him that life and love must be lived on another’s behalf.  I think, someday, he’ll come back.  Perhaps as a bird or a butterfly.

And so I try to learn, in this life, to regard each possibility and to know each dawn as a golden string.

I miss you always.  I’m so glad you came into my young life and that you will still be there in the evening.

Do me a favor, because I love you and because so many people love you, sing forever.  Sing until eternity, through calamity, resilience, exile, whatever.  Just sing.  

I dreamt of tomorrow and you were there, blowing my mind out, as usual.

all my love.

lisa

Dear Bob Dylan,

There it was- Bob Dylan wins a Pulitzer.

And he ascends.

With everything going all sorts of different ways, life and fate sliding through us. Sometimes I feel like we are actually sitting still, me barely moving through my days under this Phoenix sun, driving to work, home from work. Sitting out back smoking a cigarette, watching the sky. Sipping wine, my thoughts fleeing in a thousand directions. You, about to leave the country on tour.

But we’re actually moving aren’t we? Morning and night. This is what love continues to do to me. I’m like a borderline case. I hold my city in one hand, my dreams in the other.

I suffered a hundred thousand happy heartbeats when I learned about your Pulitzer citation. I wandered around my house like a bird. I said nothing. I drank to curb my loneliness.

All my love.

Dear Bob Dylan,

The poet, Tomaz Salamun, wrote a poem called The Four Questions of Melancholy, after which his book is titled as well, which he starts:  I know.  You’re off to war now, off to trample flowers.

I bought his book online and it arrived from a bookshop in Tucson.

I’m attracted to this poem a lot because it reminds me of something I would say to you.  I might start:  I know.  Though I don’t.

I learned today that Richard Avedon’s photographs are being shown at the Phoenix Art Museum.  Of course, these include the pictures he’s taken of you.  The showing is running through April 13th.  I think I will have to go.  I saw a flyer for the showing today and the only image on the front of the flyer was you.  An old sixties picture with you in a black trench coat, walking in New York City.

Small pleasures.  And on the ridge of each of these, you.

Dear Bob Dylan,

I discovered some lost tracks of yours. I hadn’t lost them, in fact, somebody else found them and then put them online for others to download. I say that as if the moment should suddenly turn serious. Instead, if I were you I’d be delighted. Trust me. The songs are wonderful. If I could do anything other than write you a letter I’d do it. Just to prove how much these new songs have improved my life. Honestly, I actually looked forward to my drive to work today which is saying a lot.

I’m still reading Robert Musil. What a warrior of words! Truly amazing because he always looks and whether or not he feels assured by what he sees, he says it anyway. Big thinker, like you, with an entire psychology of emotions and ideas. Even his spiritual observations are something to be looked at twice.

I feel dazzled sometimes, both physically and emotionally by what I read and what I listen to. I choose the books I choose because they pull me from whatever impatient mode I’m in into something larger, almost like a dream but real. I choose to listen to your music because I’m determined and I find your songs extraordinary.

I nearly cried with such rapid stride-like tears on my way to work today! I tell you, I nearly drowned in my emotions. Sometimes I worry, what’s this feeling? How can I work and live and act normal, be a mother, carry on as if I am just an average woman in today’s society while at the same time feel the mother of my wisdom smiling? I’m like a double-being. One moment I find my fate conservative, the next…

god knows.

It’s like a madhouse. What do you think I should do if my soul breaks?

Dear Bob Dylan,

I’m reading Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities.    By the time I’m finished with Volumes one and two I’m sure I’ll be a different person.  This is what happens when someone is introduced to great literature.  So for not writing at regular intervals like, as Musil says, a giant pendulum, my mind has been preoccupied with new ideas though my heart is always with you.   There is a significant difference in the way my life was several months ago to the way it is now.  It’s somewhat terrifying.  Not so much the day to day but the afterdays. When I look back and realize how interchangeable things can become.  And people.  People one is accustomed to looking at and spending time with, even loving, suddenly fall back into the soft depth of one’s heart and mind.  Those whom I used to depend on now ignite nothing.   Well, for all I know I could be setting myself up for a fall, since every ideal I used to value now seems less significant.  Not that my values have changed.  It can be better explained if I said:  what used to be my ideal, my model for living an exact life, is now more or less like a painting in some downtown art gallery.  It is there when I go to see it but it is no longer there when I am looking at something else.  In Musil’s book, Ulrich is the man without qualities.   I read how he is and what he is and how he uses his abilities to thwart his own inclinations.  Ulrich is also supposedly a passionate man, but not in the sense of passions as commonly understood.  Ulrich is both passionate and detached at the same time. I don’t want to jump to any conclusions but so many of Ulrich’s traits reminds me of you.  I doubt I’m totally right but I don’t think I’m completely wrong.  There’s like a vast field between you but the same sky above. 

Dear Bob Dylan,

On October 1, 1917, eighteen years before his death, Fernando Pessoa wrote a poem called “On This Whitely Cloudy Day I Get So Sad It Almost Scares Me“, in which he describes the errors of man, how man understands things to excess, how the only mystery of the Universe is not what’s missing but what’s been added, and just as words fail us when we try to express a thought, thought fails us when we try to express reality.

The day is whitely cloudy here as well. The rain has been falling since late Friday. Somewhat unusual for the desert, but not terribly so. Many of the streets flood because the ground is too hard to absorb a lot of water at once.

I sit at home safe in the damp and dreaminess of it all and write you a letter.

Pessoa states: the Universe is not an idea of mine; my idea of the Universe is an idea of mine.

Just like: You are not an idea of mine; my idea of you is an idea of mine. I understand this. It isn’t just a concept. I don’t have a knotty ego that needs intersecting. I know what matters, what counts. I have no notions. No illusions.

Every now and again there is an uprising in criticism for these letters. Shallow minded people who fail to look beyond the surface of words. They assume and take me for someone I’m not. Don’t criticize what you can’t understand, you sing. How few actually take heed of that advice.

How do I unlock the reason? How do I get people to recognize this for exactly what it is. A simple letter, word after word, scattered sentences, something given I do because it pleases me to do it.

That’s it. Something given because.

Pessoa writes, these truths are imperfect because they were spoken.

Among all the poets I’ve read, Charles Wright always manages to fill in the right words.

In his poem Black Zodiac he writes:

The unexamined life’s no different from
                                                    the examined life—
Unanswerable questions, small talk,
Unprovable theorems, long-abandoned arguments—

Perhaps it’s a question of what people are capable of. Many, not much.

If a woman loves wholly, with a heart full of gratitude and in this place of gratitude while sitting in the dark sidebar room of her house on a cold and whitely cloudy day to utter some words, with nothing but her own life to live, why shouldn’t she do it? If she has something to say that might outlive the always smaller voice of those with nothing to say, she should say it.

I’m not trying to revolutionize anybody’s life.

I just think of you sometimes. Behind the glass door of your examined life where you will forever be impervious to argument, yet people will continue to argue. Where the causes you sought or seek will be scrutinized. Where one finds you charming, another strange.

What can ever be thought or said about you, each will translate what you mean for themselves. Regardless my wonder will not diminish. What you make of any of this, peoples’ blinding self-importance, the coverage, the sentient and sentimental drive, occurences and God knows what else is anybody’s guess.

When I think of you I write it down.

Dear Bob Dylan,

Once the last ray of sunlight dissolves over the McDowell mountains and the grey of evening is tossed like gravel over the horizon, it’s no small wonder that I should look to the sky for those first few stars to appear like praying cells and the moon, that oyster which shines like a mission bell.

I find, after so many years, the same inner visions. I follow the path of your dreams. Wherever you turn regardless how awkward, restless or profound. Despite obliviousness toward my own stale and imminent future. Devotion to you remains my fate. Nevertheless.

Seems to me you will always be the fuse, the one in action that enters the room of my mind, your face full of faculty and asking so what are your intentions, what are your interests? Inspired for the trillionth time this year by your sufficiency with words, I will step into the same river twice. A flood of answers will cloud my brain, most of them quite ordinary. Just sentences.

So I will come to myself, beneath this sky which is for all its expansiveness still keeping the stars locked behind and mention, well, I mostly just focus on the songs.

Dear Bob Dylan,

If one day by some Godish brush-stroked twist of fate I should happen to meet you, among all the great occurences in my life, combining each and every aspiration I’ve ever illuminated upon inside my head, including those considered then forgotten, those that seemed impossible and those that have stagnated into indeterminacy, I know I will anxiously look back to the days when you were the unreachable, the unattainable, the dream stitched across my dreams like a beautiful star and feel somehow lessened, as if my ordinary and ordered life had suffered some great loss.

Having met you, if this should ever be the case, I would no longer have the constant heartbeat guiding my footsteps, the immense hope of possibility, the incessant urge of wonder, the flight, the chase. With no illusion to complicate my life, no belief beyond belief, nothing so resplendent, so colorful, so lovely to think and talk and write about, no longer the feeling of never feeling satisfied, I am afraid I would cease to care about anything.

If one day life finds us in some completely particular way with you there and me there, perhaps it would be best for you to turn your back. And yes, it is true that such a certain grace would unstring me while saving my future. By not speaking to me, by not making any sort of connection be it with your saint blue eyes or willing smile, a few uncommon words spoken from your mouth to my ear, the very legend of you would be diminished.

Whatever small stone of bliss I carry heart-hidden inside of me would also cease to exist, for my ordinary life would become extraordinary. I would have nothing to look forward to, no idea to pin my soul upon, nothing to absolutely dream about. The insurmountable idea of meeting you would dissipate into shadows and the shadows into expendable sighs of nostalgia and loss.

Sometimes I think about this. And I grow weary.

Dear Bob Dylan,

I have written you often.  There is always a fire burning.  No doubt I will continue to write you letters.  No doubt you will never read them.  How closely I guard my hope, capturing it like starlight falling right into my palm, a tiny treasure of poison I keep to myself.

Sometimes I think I’m almost out of words.  I’ve nothing left to tell you.  Except perhaps that the weather is nice here now.  Like summer in other places, the cities and towns that receive snow in winter.  Phoenix does not get snow.  Rainfall occasionally.  A chilly breeze now and then.  We topped out at eighty two degrees yesterday.  I almost put a sweater on.

I bought DYLAN the day it was released.  I like the postcards and the book with your pictures.  The music, of course, though I already own it.  What thrilled me the most were the songs chosen, in the order they were chosen, on each c.d.  It’s as if somebody asked me specifically which songs I would like to see on disc three.  Silvio I would have chosen along with Dignity and Blood in my Eyes, Things Have Changed and Someday Baby.  High Water reminds me of seeing you in Kansas City.  Everything is Broken reminds me of my life. 

So for the ritual of loving you, of taking you as the instrument that plays the melody to each hour I exist, to the morning and its overspill of glorious sunlight, to the glory glory glory of falling into the slaughterhouse of your spinning voice, I’m happy to have this new release.

I think I’m going to smoke a cigarette.  I believe I’ll enjoy a glass of red wine.  Here’s to you in all of your thriving.

You must know I’d sell my heart for any one of your songs. 

Dear Bob Dylan,

It’s raining sunlight and I am in the middle of waiting for my daughter to arrive home from school. I was reading a book of poetry by a prominent poet and many if not most of his lines made me think of you. So much so that I wished I could show you by leaning across a table, turning the page toward you and pointing with my finger.

I would say, read this one here. And you would. Perhaps you’d agree that it was good or that something in it spoke to you. Sometimes just the tone of a poem is enough. Oftentimes for me, it is the very words, the absolute music that thrusts through each line.

I love endings especially. I think the end can tell just how truly humble and honest a poet is. How many bones he willingly exposed, how many teeth he bared, how much of his great heart bled onto the page.

I love as well when a poem makes me ask: what next? And, where do we go from here?

I like that about your songs too. Though I often listen attentively while they’re playing, I listen in hindsight too when the music is no longer playing. When I’m alone in a room like I am now with no sound but the jostle of this keypad and my breathing.

However inadequate my memory is or how varied I might remember a line you sung, I have always believed in what you have to say. Or maybe it’s that I believe in how you say it.