Dear Bob Dylan,

Roland Jooris wrote a poem called Village in which he states in the first stanza:

a village is a circle/ drawn by a hand/ around a church;

It’s been so long since I’ve been to church.  Oh, if only Fernando were alive, instead he’s not and can not woo me with his sense of boredom and disgust.  If only you were not so distant to me now.  I think I’ve lost touch.  Your every move is no longer a heartfelt preservation in my mind, more like an objective idea.  To this day people, random strangers write to me to discuss your latest ‘goings on’ and what can I say?  But:  did he really?  Where did you hear that?  I haven’t heard that!

At any rate, I’m still making my way out of congruity.  Still plugging along, as they say.  Still scouring with brutality the digital news I can gather, here and there, when I’m not working or driving somewhere or writing some silly poem.  I will be among the many attendees August 11th in Arizona.  I’m sure you’ll be great.  I’m equally sure my heart will be torn into a thousand pieces of red.

I love your new album.  I listen to it every single day.  It is of a different temperature, full of nostalgia.  I love it.  I eat nostalgia for breakfast.  I swallow blue imagination until my throat bursts.

Dear Bob Dylan,

I can’t not write.  I can’t not take the time to hold a pen and write you a letter, even if my pen is my keyboard, I can’t not when my heart just keeps pushing, pushing.

I learned about your tour, how you’re coming to Arizona in August.  The 11th.  And how presale tickets go up on the 11th of May and that is when the air began folding in.  And that is when everything in existence began with the number eleven.  Like brand new, gleaming, even if a conscience echoed here and there, even if my perception was all azure and cloud-like, I found out you are coming.  Here.

To this terrible State with its terribly hot weather and all facades will fall because you will be here.  Right here.  I’ll make a room for you.  I’ll burn you breakfast because I’ll have no desire to cook.  I’ll have no sense about me so I might forget to wear make-up.  I might hurry about because I’ll have lost all reason and direction.  You see, I love you and my love for you remains unmarried.

I try and try to go about my daily life and then you announce you’re coming here.  To Arizona.  Right here.  My own backyard.  And what am I supposed to do?  I swear I will probably leave tracks in the asphalt on my way to the show.  I will surrender once again to the expanse of your music.  The hour may be dark, the month may be tepid, but all I can care to think about is you drawing close.

I wait sincerely like a tenant of some barren holding room.  I wait inside of my skin.  I’m so thrilled you are coming!  I can’t wait to see you.

Dear Bob Dylan,

In the heart’s slaughterhouse, my mind is forever transformed.  It’s what emerges afterwards which is the problem I must reconcile.  I was in Virginia for lecture when you released a free version of Beyond Here Lies Nothin’.  I looked for a computer in between my obligations.  Nonetheless, I was forced to wait until today to hear the song.

Like me, God is not deaf.  The song is fierce, I write to remember it now and find I must play it again as I write, for the fifteenth time.  Butter, bread and salt.  Salt and water.  Soft bread and sweet butter. I’m in over my head waiting for the 28th to arrive.

I love you, absolutely.  And there is nothing you or anybody can do about it.

Dear Bob Dylan,

For days on end I give my heart to the roaring shadow of your life.

I speak the language, transform the voice of your guiding light-  I want to restrain myself.  Almost to the point of negation, but nobody is buying it.

What’s with you, they ask.

I can only say-  the attitude of God.

Stops them dead in their tracks.

I imagine you drifting through European corridors on your way to your next stage performance (as I wait here in Arizona) where terrible tailors await to mend you suits and cobblers stand with hammer in hand to build you a new pair of boots.  I wait.  A non-woman/non-person, under the sun, reflecting my views at no one.  

Even within these monotonous moments, I think of you.

Hearts eye, my soul’s national holiday.

Did you realize the release date of Together Through Life is my son’s eighteenth birthday?

Back and forth, back and forth I ride.  The poet Visar Zhiti claims a cry runs barefoot.

I just look forward to you coming home.  Cry or no cry.

Dear Bob Dylan,

Once I got used to the idea I would never be Gertrude Stein and like her wished I had died when I was a little baby so as not to feel anything I changed my mind.  Every person has inside of them a person, the very person they know or wish or want or dream they are (could be/should be).  Why so many of us keep this “other” person hidden is beyond me.  Such beautiful powers of apprehension we have.

So now is the time to question my own apprehension, my many fixed habits with less than little comprehension.  It’s like I’ve been worn and rubbed down by life, the city I live in, its insecurities and alienation, nature mixed with pavement, soccer moms in their suv’s repeating and replicating, ornaments on the freeway.  The pace and stride of my mind is so unlike the people I’m surrounded by.  One too many common sentences by one too many disconnected women and before you know it, I’ve said it too.  I say inwardly, “Don’t worry about it.  Sometimes words slip out and meanings don’t have any meaning and on behalf of another person sometimes you’re just trying to be nice.”  But I hate it.

I made a promise to myself once.  I made a determination to always be myself.  To love what I love, to do what I love, to live eat speak breathe dream know what I love as if the love of it itself was who I am, as though my spirit were hazed with a light of gold.  To not care who I impressed or who was listening, to avoid the drama and be my most logical self.

You know what I love about you?  I mean besides your comfortable voice and your attractive face and your awfully unblocked and unburdened way of living, I love your fractured-ness.  I love how you’ve made friends with both life and death.  I think the name Bob Dylan translates into treasure.  It doesn’t matter what language is used.

If all of us could live our life even a smidgen of one degree to how you live your life, the world would be a bigger and better place.

I hear you, I listen to your music, I read your poetry and articles and books and interviews, I watch the videos.  I thank you for your trouble, for your roof and outlined life, for the swing of your song, for the ups and downs of your performances.  I’m like a beetle waiting to be turned over with each new announcement of news.

When you sing I walk out of myself.  The person inside of me comes around.  Smiling and springy, less talkative, more attentive.

I believe there must be something wrong with me.  I’m like a bicycle without a chain, an engine without any oil, a hairpin turn with both headlights gone.  Without you I’m very shy and old fashioned, a mute, a barely noted observation, an inaudible voice.  Books piled around me, poets I read just out of curiosity, sentences that say so little to me as if they were visitors, cousins on vacation,  and I still have to go to work.

You are like the mouth of a room, an entire creation beyond each wall and fence and borderline.  I walk in freely, anticipating every single thing like a frightened bird.  I walk out crying.  Ashamed by my own lack of intelligence.

To which all things return.  Such beautiful powers of apprehension I have.  In my worry and doubt I turn to them.  For life I hide in the shade frowning.  For you I smile easily.  For life I hide in the shade frowning.  For you I release my bewilderment and flower with affection.

Dear Bob Dylan,

It seems impossible now.  First of the new year.  I spent the past year learning to fail and doing it so well.  Before that I had so much time to make you my suitor.  If I woke and wanted to fly somewhere to see you how simple it was to grow wings.  My heart was smitten enough to create anything.  I miss being reckless.  I miss colliding with your voice wishing my body would break hoping my mind would bend wanting the pluck of your string bite of your harp winged heel of your movements under any sky and all its monotonous stars.  How easy it was to pursue my dreams.  I especially miss how the evening would open like an infinite palace, moon like a sulfuric feather, revolving winds, the immense and persistent wait for you to come onstage and then once you did my astonishment once again.  Nothing has changed.  Everything has changed.  What can I do?

I miss you.

Dear Bob Dylan,

The heart is a hatchery of feeling:  love, loss, long preparations, waiting.  I live inside of my heart and its like living inside an impatient room.  The walls are always creaking as if past their prime.  The paint is always peeling, dropping like ornamental dew.  The light hangs dim against the floor of each quadrant, a blind man’s fingers yearning to touch something, anything.

What is love for?  The sky can not tell us.  Beauty can not say.  My mother sits on an airplane for nine hours, dropping this country for another.  My father is dead.  My husband puts on airs of confidence regardless of my betrayal.  Hours descend.  My soon-to-be adult children talk with the stubborn inward edge of this generation.  I come home to them.  Listen.  Feel the dullness of my senses and try to overcompensate by nodding my head.

I know in my heart impossible things.  I make you the sorry happy face of everyone.  I do not need any fancy words to make you fancy.  Just as sunrise needs no expression of beauty if the sunrise is already beautiful.  Of course, I could leave but you would still be the key to everything.

I see you as an extension of love.  Blow wind blow.

Dear Bob Dylan,

How to account for this long, lost weekend where I’ve done nothing profound except perhaps to sit in a canvas chair out back and look at the sun which looks like a sun, very bright.  Staring too long my eyes become slippery in their sockets.

If only I could show it to you.  The sun I mean, the one that hangs over Arizona like an open oven, so extraordinarilly bright, more than a coin, feverishly bright.  I can no longer explain.

I can’t see an ocean from here, nor a river or a lake.  Some mountains and a lot of sand.  Sometimes a dark rain will fall and for awhile the air will seem renewed.  I like the beginning.  When it ends it is over.  Totally.

I’m not complaining.  It’s only that today seems so deliberately empty.  I wonder too sometimes if this day-in, day-out endurance is nothing more than mellifluous destiny and how is it that I should be the one to arrive with my chin in my hand, placid and waiting, staring at sunbeams or counting stars.

Naturally I must be dreaming.

I drove 100 miles yesterday looking for something to do.  When I returned home I walked 75 yards.  I checked the mail, spent two minutes patting the head of neighborhood dog.  I fell asleep reading Saint Francis.  When I awoke I stepped out back to stare at the sun.  Sitting forlorn in a chair my hands and feet arranged in pairs, my eyes for the sake of remembering closed but the sound of the sun looking caused me to reopen them.

There is nothing I wouldn’t do for you.  Go blind, eat razors, spend nine years rusting away in some dead climate like southern Arizona.  It’s a calling I suppose.  Soon it will all come to a head.  My life will dissolve like snowflakes on the Superstition mountains.  In which direction?  I have no idea, either way I’m sure will be appalling.  I’ll have only your songs to console me.

You’re like an eclipse.  Hands up for protection I still muster a peek.  Fascinated by divulgence and the threat of blindness, my will unclassified keeps wanting another look.

Some days the hours feel like bills, as if my future were a debt, the whole upstairs of space and God waiting to collect.

Dear Bob Dylan,

There are mornings I wake to silence after many dreams of you. And what is my crime? When I put my face to the world it is always smiling. Though my heart is bottomless and moonless, I take nothing. I walk the raked earth, pass the tall mountains, eat and survive on my eclectic human passions.

I feel born. I feel I’ve never been born.

One book has it that you came from the snow. Another claims it doesn’t matter. I stoop like an immigrant under your sound. I go walking beneath a bread of stars and think of you, on the edge of madness, I walk with a thousand questions in my heart.

Time can only transcribe in passages. It is almost unbearable. I have been fluttering like a little moth around the light of Tell Tale Signs. I sometimes think of the hours, the years….

elsewhere life continues, the hammer strikes. I return to you. With a firm grip.

It’s a miracle.

Dear Bob Dylan,

Bob, I am writing this on behalf of my heart. It loves you from its scorched foundation. I personally have never been in love, but I have heard that it is a degree of optimism one often feels justified in. The cure for love is madness. The disjointed thought between a volatile mind and an unquenchable thirst, past all understanding. Now it was I who came to you. Perhaps trying to perceive a higher truth. Nothing of which could track or trample you down. My heart tumbles sight unseen.

September 6th when you came out on stage in San Diego I thought someone put a scythe to the moon, the way its light fell in tilts and angles to green up the damp grass. You looked, I feel such a need to explain, like an oddity all alone, scowling at the keyboard or the spectacle of heads and hair that came out to see you with their copper faces and loud occurences. At times must get revolting. I’d need a thousand more of you to create an honest description.

Baudelaire wrote that the dialogue is dark and clear when a heart becomes its mirror. Rimbaud wrote nothing wakes without you; neither inspiration nor love. My father, full of white-haired professorship, an estimable man with neither an axe to grind nor a heart of disquiet, once said at best the heart teeter-totters on the brink of love, at times in casual softkey it dangles, at others the weight of hope to which all life feels unbearable.

Surrounding you the sound of many winds, hands clamoring, hearts hammering, fists of air, the unflinching weather of dreams to which every catalyst is born.

My mother fell in love with an auto mechanic. To which he responded by pushing her down a flight of stairs when she was seven months pregnant. My sister fell in love with a police officer. To which he responded by entering another woman’s gate after ten years of circling with careful consideration the chambers of my sisters heart and finding them no longer useful. Each love honeymooned, folded up and discarded.

If I could have only one sound for the rest of my life, one repetitious and arabesques tinkling of joy, it would be your shiny music and bright poetry commingled. That alone would be enough to constitute a tender chance.