Dear Bob Dylan,

Ever notice how life gets on regardless of one’s participation? I realize this most whenever I am called to do something or be somewhere I ordinarily would not be, much less do.

It’s so simple really to disappear. To not be when there is nothing or no one to be for.

For days sometimes I walk around with a great burden on my shoulders and yet I don’t know what the burden is. All my hours are accounted for but how much longer? How long before I will no longer require an alarm clock to wake me up, to get me out of bed, to comb my hair and brush my teeth, to begin some sort of throw-together breakfast for my kids. Everything I have to offer lately, my children refuse.

Mom, my daughter said to me yesterday, Oh my god stop being such a mom!

Impossible! I answered back while pointing one finger up into the air.

I know there are reasons for things. Reasons for happiness, reasons for shame. There’s a reason my daughter feels the need to be cold sometimes. People change. I should say, people need change. Stagnancy stitches the mouth and sucker punches the soul.

The world doesn’t always tell me what it wants. Most of the time it just sits there waiting for me to act. The thing is, if I don’t act, it moves on. What a ridiculous thing to go on about, me and my time, me and my too much time though I squash every minute under my shoe and I suffocate any second left.

I stand loose. I do. I stand loosely on the border because I don’t want the attention but then at the same time I do. Soon I get it and it’s too much, I want to be left alone. I seek meaning in books. Poetry books, novels, short stories, song lyrics. I want to read what people think. I want to read their meaning, their reason for things. It’s so easy for me to get tangled in an authors story. I tell you, I’ve fallen in love with many authors. One for two years, another for two days. Deeply in love. And then I met somebody else.

I was talking on the phone to my sister today about our upcoming trip to see you in Indianapolis. She told me she met somebody at work from Indianapolis and when they heard we were going they asked how long. My sister said four days and they replied, oh that’s plenty of time, there’s nothing to do there.

Nothing to do? I can’t imagine that. There is only this thrill running through me. I will probably drive past the venue twenty times before the show is even close to beginning. I will turn to my sister and say what I always say: can you believe Bob Dylan will be right here the same time as us?

And she will respond like she always responds: I know!

In a way, in a bigger way than even I am willing to admit, you are my reason for things.

Dear Bob Dylan,

Today is my son’s birthday. He’s sixteen. It sounds so strange stating that. My son is sixteen. I mean, wasn’t I just sixteen? Well, we know how time is. One moment you’re looting your neighbors refrigerator, the next you’re teaching your child how to drive.

When I was sixteen I didn’t know how suddenly instances could come upon me. How quickly my range of thinking could veer. Or how illuminated my heart could become when faced with something I’d never faced before.

In your new song, Huck’s Tune, you sing about being “next in command” and the idea just terrifies me. Not for myself as being next but for myself when your turn has come and gone. I suppose I’ll still write you letters, these blind stabs at practical episodes of my life.

And so the morning is bright, and all the years I’ve lived are dead and gone, and my heart is still this insolent thermos waiting to blow. But, I still have today and all the hours before me, who knows what brilliant news awaits. The summer is upon us here in Arizona. Near record temperatures are expected this weekend. I set out the dishes for a birthday breakfast. I pile the presents and prop the balloon bouquet. The day opens like a new page in a book I’ve been dying to read.

You should see the flowers blooming in the neighbors yard. I swear if they could make a sound they’d be singing. And the birds have taken over my own yard. I keep putting more seed out and they keep finishing it. And the pigeon who decided to move into my back yard is still here. One of his wings is injured I think but he manages to get in some flight practice everyday.

I wonder sometimes whether or not the soul gets to choose where it lands, who it loves and how it swallows its time. I look at this pigeon, he’s pure white by the way, with a few dark gray markings, and how he’s accustomed himself to my yard and when he wants to come inside, he flings his body against the glass-paned back door. I open it and he totters in, perches himself on one of my potteries and falls asleep.

Clever bird.

And so here I am once more bent over my keyboard to share some half availing information with you.

There is a poem by a person named Lal Ded (Lalla) estimated to be written in the 14th century.

It says:

The soul, like the moon,
is new, and always new again.

The idea is nice. The moon is just the moon, but I like the idea.

Yesterday, after I played your new song for everyone, I forgot to mention, when it ended I was the first one to break the silence.

I said: isn’t that a nice song?

Everyone agreed that it was.

Dear Bob Dylan,

With a small heart
that is how
and little resources
that is how
and a lot at stake
that is how
and a well of tears
tremulous behind each eye
that is how
but fortified
by the knowledge
of what is about
to take place
that is how
and by belief
and thought being
combed flat
while the heart,
that old brown sack,
expands to become
a hammock
that is how
I rise each day
as the sun rises
with me,
to claim my place,
with a small wordless
heart yearning
for the only everlasting
thing. Now, everyone sing.

I bought Hucks Tune today on iTunes. Ach! I love it. Because of it I don’t think that singing will ever be done. I wish you could have heard it. I plugged my iPod in and turned the volume up on the speakers. I told everyone to hush and once they did I hit play.

I tell you, the room was quiet as death the whole four minutes through.

You know, I’ve always felt that God was not that far. That I could reach Him anytime I felt like it. You are so far. Worlds away from me. With God it’s just heaven.

Dear Bob Dylan,

I have my ticket!

I wasn’t able to secure front row, or anything near front row. Actually, I’m not sure where my seat is. The confirmation tells me a pile of letters and so, I have to believe they know what they’re talking about.

I learned today that Kurt Vonnegut is from Indianapolis as well. Isn’t that strange? I was just talking about him.

I listened to your interview at Rolling Stone. Then I bought the magazine and read the full thing. I like it better when I hear you. All of the um’s and ah’s make you more human. Or more like somebody I could relate to. I can’t wait to see you. I think it’s going to be the best time.

This is a silly letter. It’s almost as if I were talking to my sister on the phone. Short sentences, various thoughts.

I bought a book yesterday at one of my favorite local used book stores. The book is called American Wives. It consists of thirty short stories by women from 1852 through 1982. I am only nine stories in. The tenth was written by Sylvia Plath. Reading her, I need to keep to myself for a little while at least.

There is a story called The Pelican’s Shadow by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings that I really like, that I can really feel and put myself there, in her shoes. She talks about how fresh from college she tumbled, butter side up, into a job. And I knew those words because I lived them. Except for me it was fresh from childhood, I tumbled, butter side up, into marriage. Into my husbands arms.

And I don’t know any differently. I don’t know how to live on my own because I’ve never had to. I imagine it would be pretty lonely. I’m starting to notice the silences now because my children are growing up. In a couple of years they will both be gone, out of the house and onto their own lives. It’s so hard to believe. Time is such a thief isn’t it?

I’ve been thinking what to do with all of my time once my children don’t need me to drive them to everywhere and don’t need me to be standing there when everywhere grows tiresome. I think I’ll write my own story.

I don’t have a title yet.

Dear Bob Dylan,

Did you know Indianapolis is the home town of James Whitcomb Riley? My favorite poet since I was a child.

I didn’t know that until yesterday.

When I read that you were coming home and then I tried to find a place to see a show, at first I couldn’t decide. California is closest but I’ve been there so many times, I was born there, I’ve lived there, I’ve visited there more often than I can remember. Kansas City I hold near and dear to my heart, I was tempted to go there again.

Then I saw Indianapolis, Indiana listed. And I like the sound of the name, The Lawn at White River. And I discovered it’s only one thousand four hundred and ninety eight miles away. And James Whitcomb Riley was born and grew up there. And not even for a moment did I have to consider it.

So, I’ll see you in July! I’ll be the one standing coffin-quiet, the gladdest child inside the woman who knows better than to hope for anything more.

Dearest Dear O’ Dear Bob Dylan,

I can hide the lazy slogan of your kiss
in the applause of my body…

Isn’t that a nice pair of lines? They are from a poem titled Indolent Distance written by a man named Nic van Bruggen.

The first man I ever fell in love with was my father. Yes, it’s true. I was in love with my father. He was so difficult you see. So hard to know and understand. He spoke so little to me and my sisters and when he did choose to speak at any length about anything important he did so to my mother. Or at my mother. And always in Norwegian. Some of which us girls could pick up on. Some we couldn’t.

We always understood jeg elsker deg. It means I love you. And we always knew when we were being spoken about because he would forget and drop our names inside the sentences’ long lines.

A therapist might say I have father issues. The thing of it is, I’ve never had an issue with my father. I loved him and still do. He was this obsessively quiet character who liked to write and draw and paint. He liked to watch the evening news. And he loved to have pecan pie with his nightly coffee.

In the movie Masked and Anonymous your character cries over his fathers death bed. It’s like this tiny breath suspended on your cheek in the scene.

Listen, I cry too. Our bloodlines force the tears out of us.

As always, I lean into the musical scenes. All day today I listened to Cold Irons Bound.

Dear Bob Dylan,

I’ve been invited to represent this country at a poetry festival in India.

The news came to me this morning and it made the day seem tinselly. The sun seemed brighter and the breeze blew like watercolors throughout the air. The leaves seemed greener. The sky bluer.

You know, the funny part is, two of the poems that caused me the invitation were written for you. Seven poems total and two were just for you.

I guess it wouldn’t be hard for someone interested in my poetry to guess which poems are yours, which are my fathers, the rest of which are pieces of my soul glossed over paper.

Where others have spent years in school learning the proper forms of poetry, I do not know. I only sit and say some things and hope they pan out. I want my words to wander and I want the readers of those words to want to wonder about the world, about life but, mostly about themselves.

I spend every waking hour drunk on poetry. I read so much it shatters my mind, splinters my eyes and yet, nobody disturbs the modest heart in me like you. Like your words do.

I think sometimes, beyond words what is there? A large, white whisper. A broken door. A brick fence with one block on top of another, never ending, higher and higher until the soul and the body are divided. The heart and the mind are considered opposites.

I don’t mean to rattle on. I think of you sometimes as a vast field I visit whenever I feel like being alone. A vast, golden field with nothing but space and sky. If I talk out loud nobody will stop breathing. There will be no sudden deaths in the doorway. Just you and I, wrapped in the arms of night. Even the wind will hurry away so as not to interrupt our conversation.

I know that you are busy. That you are a busy man, that your geology of thought is always being intruded upon. I don’t want to make things worse. I just want to add to the complement.

Therefore….

I Know Why It Is That I Love You

The half bright half bending look
In your eyes. Smoky laughter.
Your face coarse from the weather
Of years. Your mouth opening to speak.
Into it I go flying, seeing nothing.
I know the distance between us.
The physical as well as the emotional.
We are strangers, I know this too.
I love you in spite of it. I know
Your face, the autumn of it, the
Falling shadows, distance and the
Awful crowds that form like walls
Between us. I fare because I see
You anyway, the silver streaks
That run through your hair, the
Collar of your coat that when you turn
Takes you away. I conceive of
Your hands disappearing into the
Dark lake of your pockets.
I conceive what no one else can.
Your bookish silence. Your heart
Which you keep locked inside stone.
The wolf of your ambition
That even when you sleep, roams
Closer and closer to me.
I open my mouth.
Into it you will go flying.

-

Logic returns again and again. So far it hasn’t taught me anything.

Dear Bob Dylan,

As a female, I have lived with the illusion that I can only do so much wrong.

Eventually all will be forgiven. Whether it’s because I have a pretty face or I happen to look good that day. Flared tempers will ease, the temperature of the man’s mind will cool. It’s like I have this tiny good luck charm hidden in my front pocket. Whenever things get nasty, I reach my hand down and press it into my palm.

Surely the world doesn’t work this way. Not everywhere. And surely I am here, like anyone, heartsick and unhappy. I’m only mean because of the things I’ve seen and experienced. Life is not a declaration of spirit, it’s just this phase we all have to go through. The symptoms of my life are the illusion; testiness, crossed hairs, bewilderment.

I mean, what the hell is wrong with people? What makes me wrong and him right?

Whenever things get unhappy, I try to think what it would be like to be a different person living on a different street. Maybe a different country.

I read somewhere that each day is like an iceberg. I think it was Charles Wright. He said, each day is an iceberg, dragging its chill paunch underfoot.

It feels like that a lot doesn’t it?

Dear Bob Dylan,

I was not thinking of transformation the first time I saw you, though I did not go to see you with any thought of insensibility either. I just wanted to see you.

It was such a simple, unassuming idea.

Buy an airline ticket, rent a hotel room, rent a car, bring some money. Four steps.

I was not expecting you to drag my heart up through my eyes. I was not expecting to leave Kansas City with a concussion in my chest and an empty pelvis.

For all of the past three years since that September show, I have made every excuse, disguised with persistence my silly behavior whenever your name gets mentioned.

You can’t imagine how distant it feels. Sometimes I just want someone to tell it to and so I’ve chosen you to talk about you.

I do not come from a long line of obsessed women. The women in my family can simply glance at a man and know in our heart of hearts that we love him. And then we let our feelings go. I didn’t attend your show to fall in love. I went to hear you play.

It’s your fault really. If you weren’t so charismatic, squinting your eyes, tapping your foot until my throat goes bone-dry. I mean, who shoots arrows whenever he opens his mouth to sing? Eventually, one is bound to hit somebody.

I just happened to be there.

Dear Bob Dylan,

Sometimes I sit and watch God’s places, the sky at night with all of its stars, the moon as if anything but a full moon could give someone such a strange ache. The doves. So many doves around here. Pigeons too. Not the prettiest bird but a bird nonetheless. Into love and out again. Up and down I go.

Of all the songs ever written, I like yours the best. Better than the birds even. Better than the soul’s song which speaks only about promise and deliverance.

Yours, on the other hand, speak about impermanence and how things change.

It’s been six years now that I’ve been listening to your songs. I mean, truly listening. If my ears had arms, they’d be wide open and receiving. And I’m still restless. I still want more. The silence is so condescending to me now. The noise of life; the breeze, the weather, the neighbors ill-contained opening and shutting of doors, the voices that drift up and down the street, children, car engines, the barking of a dog…pardon me but I wish they’d all find somewhere else to go.

You’re in London tonight. Tonight and tomorrow night. I have a sister who lives not one hour from London. Look, I don’t know what I’m doing here. I don’t know why I am sitting here in the United States at my little white desk while you are in London. And I have a sister living right there. I should be at my sister’s house. I should be sitting in London. I should be at your show.

It kills me to wonder how my own mind works. Thoughtlessly thoughtlessly smashing my time.

How I’d love to see you, song in your mouth, euphoria in your hair, spirit branching.

God, I’m so dumb. My mind is such an idiot. I tell it all of the time, listen to the heart. The heart knows everything.