Dear Bob Dylan,

In an anthology titled Poets of the New Century Jack Myers writes an introduction about what missing is, about a man who goes out to introduce the thing that was missing.

Part of it goes: A man went out to bring back what was missing, what he felt he missed. That was the plan, to hold himself open for as long as he could to what he missed.

Myers goes on to write about the things he began collecting and bringing back to places that didn’t make sense. A sprig of pine to a barroom, a mushroom to a 3rd-floor walkup, an ant to an executive’s desk. He knew he’d be questioned and he thought how ridiculous it was to think one would recognize what wasn’t there.

Still he paid no mind to this and continued on his quest. As these things began to show what was missing, the man still felt that something was missing. Even as a man at a bar, who had been mulching over a domestic argument smelled the sprig of pine and bought jewelry for his wife.

Myers writes how a man is appointed to introduce what was still missing. He numbers and classifies what was already there, he summons up the 5 W’s of the story: Who, What, Why, When, and Where realizing again of course, what was already there.

In despair and at a loss for words, he sees an ant introduce himself out of the pile of what was missing and without any knowledge of writing, begin writing out what wasn’t there.

It’s up to us, the reader, to decipher what was missing. Myers asks, ….moments of pure air and light. Isn’t that what missing is?

Perhaps it is truth, the knowing that what we are doing we are meant to do. Like you with your music, passion welling up, blossoming of soul.
And me with my poetry and letters where I do not place any boundaries around my thoughts, but say even when silent all I am thinking.

And so with our truths hungrily eating through the days and years, where your truth is the man appointed to show me what is missing, whether that be a sprig of pine, a mushroom, an ant and mine is to take those things and use them to their final line.

Dear Bob Dylan,

Because this is make believe, I can say what I want to say. I can choose what I want to write. I can open the womb of my mind and give birth over and over again.

I can name the sex and I can amputate the reader from my thoughts.

I can stuff this little glass box full of ideas until the lines scurry in search of some breathing room. I can be silly or serious.

I am a simple girl really.

I can be a glutton, a drunk, a lover of words. I can call you mine and there isn’t anything you can do about it.

Because this is make believe, I can spread a feast of love across the table of my soul and you, my darling distance, my homebrewed religion, my christmas morning and spring blossom can never have to know.

I can sit or stand. Laugh or cry. I can dance around the room if I want to.

I can break my own heart and I can mend my broken heart.

Satan can be sitting on my shoulder and Jesus can be calling my name from behind a cloud.

And from Tennessee to Timbuktu my words can fall like a pile of rain.

I can jump up and down while waving my arms or I can dangle like a piece of fruit.

All of this I can do, with or without your solemn grace.

I can love you like a point of view and I can break that love to pieces. I can dream you so long you disappear.

I can go out into the yard, round about midnight and see how tender everything is-
the soft-bright moonlight, the babiest of stars with their tiny sawdust faces, the flicker of white against the darkness.

Tiny claw-like branches of a mesquite whose limbs are summer heavy with seed. The rocks and grass. The lone dog twitching his tail in sleep.

And then I can come back inside, kiss my children goodnight, kiss my husband goodnight, kiss you, my oppression of grandeur, goodnight.

And you wouldn’t even have to press your lips to mine.

Dear Bob Dylan,

Economically speaking, some might say that without a purpose one has no purpose.

I write as if I can analyze this statement.

Before I learned how to crawl I had a purpose. By the time I could whistle, I knew what my purpose was.

So the eyelids unfold and the mask drops-
and at the tender age of thirty seven I discover that language is my reality, sure as my vertebrae, it supports me.

And I do not look out toward the possibilities of tomorrow, but suspend myself in the actualities of today.

Still.

Some say, you need to get over this ridiculous obsession, find another outlet.

As James Richardson said: Greater than the temptations of beauty are those of method.

Not to say I write to you methodically, but that I am too grown to bend.

And even as a ghost, I will attempt to sit down and pen you a phrase of introduction.

Something like…

Devotion, an apple.
Analysis, a kiss.

Chance, the silent wind.

To be or not to be,
that is the question.

All my love (for which there are no rules for),

Lisa

Dear Bob Dylan,

What has the ability to transcend between two people whom have never met? Thoughts do I suppose. I think of you so often I can only imagine on some level how that energy must swirl through the atmosphere.

Everyone who knows me also knows how huge my adoration for you is. Many can’t understand it and so I’m often asked, why do you like Bob Dylan so much? People are diverse and so I tend to generalize my reasons depending on who I’m talking to.

To one I might say how your music is such a harsh necessity in my life, without it I might be a more ignorant person, a little blind and twice as dumb. To another I might explain that you are the voice of passion and articulation, so essential to this world and even worlds away from home, how your songs can age yet still remain crucially young, affecting minds today. To somebody else, perhaps feeling that nothing I could say would make much sense, I might just say because I think he’s sexy, or he stimulates my brain.

I like you so much because of all those reasons and many others.

I like how you can gather ideas and lure us to listen. I like how remote you are while delivering your songs with such yearning. It thrills me when I’m attending one of your shows and something makes you laugh. Your happiness makes me happy. I admire most deeply how you carry each song to its conclusion, whether you’re talking about love or betrayal or crime.

Somewhere in one of these letters I must have told you how your music rounds with intelligence, how your words which are so dear to me distinguish you from all the rest, how your voice lingers in my head for days after hearing a particular live version of a song I discovered on some remote web site. Surely I’ve said all of this to you before now.

Once I was sitting in the third row at one of your shows. You were just concluding Absolutely Sweet Marie when a young guy behind me tapped my shoulder and said, that is my favorite song of his, I love how assured he sounds when he sings it.

This guy couldn’t have been more than eighteen or nineteen years old. I smiled at him and nodded, then turned back so not to miss another second and caught you just as you buckled in above the keyboard to sing Masters of War. My heart fell.

It feels like only yesterday.

Dear Bob Dylan,

Congratulations on the Prince of Asturias Award.

All day I’ve listened to Modern Times. As if to prove once again that I have no identity, nor the ability to speak or dream when caught within the resilient cannon bone of your voice. Beyond what each song provides or doesn’t provide so much as bestows, yes, because that is what each song does, it bestows upon us the brightest gift. From them we are no longer the listener nor the borrower but the possessor. We are allowed to take each song, touch them one by one, and make them ours.

One of the things the prize jury for the Prince of Asturias Award said was, “He’s considered one of the most important figures of song, a form in which he combines, in a majestic way, the beauty of his poetry and ethical commitment.”

There you have it, a word or two beyond refinement.

What can I do, but keep silent and listen to your songs. I simply don’t know how to give you a truer blessing.

Like the poet John Yau wrote, what can I do, I have dreamed of you so much, what can I do, lost as I am in the sky. Now that I dream of you so much, my lips are like clouds.

Dear Bob Dylan,

Once in a dream you told me about worship. The act of people worshipping what they couldn’t see. Your voice was soft and bare. Faith, you said, is one way we age beyond our doubts. Touch is another.

That morning I awoke thinking if I never dreamt again it wouldn’t matter.

It’s beautiful dreaming isn’t it? It’s beautiful beautiful. Two times. To have somebody so separate, if only by my own imagination, touch me with words. So private, regardless of the actual distance. To wake that morning to what is given, a new day, unsubmerged and happy, I swear I must have aged in earnest then.

And through it all I think about my daily life with intensity. I don’t take it for granted. Nor you. I don’t take you for granted. Were it not for my birthpath, the mathematics of placement amongst the sun and planets on the day I was born, I might just run after you.

What shakes me more than your words is the physical way you continue to deliver them. More people should realize, before their time is up, the visions being gracefully handed down to them. They should pry their minds away from sex and t.v. long enough at least to see you one time. God help them, if they forget their eyes.

Somebody wrote something once about diffusing the muse. If one can diffuse the muse, one can accomplish most anything on their own without the unwillingness to plug another human soul. I disagree. To diffuse my muse, you, my most anticipated longing, would be an incredibly significant loss. It would be as though I were riding in an elevator when suddenly the power left. I’d either suffocate or plunge.

For seven years now I’ve been devouring your supply. I’ve been borrowing your past to invent my future. I’ve been listening acutely. I’ve found you to be the master of distraction, the shameless should-could-would when everyone else is shouting don’t.

Something as soft as a smile, a word or a dream. Every time I see you anywhere I feel fragile but willing to lose some part of myself if it means gaining some small piece of you.

Dear Bob Dylan,

It never occurred to me seven years ago when I picked up your album, Time Out of Mind, to listen to on my drive back and forth to work that I would on this day be writing you a letter. Another letter, I should say, in a long string of letters.

I am just a child. My letters are a child’s cry.

Here where everything is next to perfect, I still choose to sit in a room alone trying to talk to you, as if my pen could hold vocabulary and the page it’s poised upon could substitute for my voice.

The weather today in Arizona is undeniably different. Much cooler than expected for June, overcast and breezy. It makes for something of a tiresome day. Nothing worth doing but sitting on a comfortable couch and reading. I read today from a book of collected works by Muriel Rukeyser.

I sat down. I opened the book and this is the poem I saw:

Then

When I am dead, even then,
I will still love you, I will wait in these poems,
When I am dead, even then
I am still listening to you.
I will still be making poems for you
out of silence.
Silence will be falling into that silence,
it is building music.

Curious don’t you think? And crushing too, how Muriel with her long ago words could manage to break me out of my inevitable hub of now. What is life but a direction always moving out. This way or that’a way. Gone. Either way it’s moving.

I love you.

Love is such a loving and uncomplicated thing. Really.

I love you.

Just these three little words.

I don’t even have to know you on a personal level to know. Imagine ourselves on a microscopic level. Imagine us with the same strictness you imagine life in general. With strength perhaps. Conviction. A center of inward motion, circle of belief…faith…hope even.

At any rate, we’re both mortals anyway. I am a mortal girl. I can’t touch the sun. You can’t give me the moon. I love you. I think you are incredible. A magical man who has the ability to teach others how to be more human.

All souls, that is what we are. A giant river all moving along together. Some of us water, some of us stone.

Dear Bob Dylan,

Hello. Maybe it seems like an empty thing, me writing you letters. To someone who for four and a half decades, year after year, has been turning songs on their heads, reinventing the way people think, taking the very emotion of things and giving it a voice, whether that voice be full of grief or full of joy.

I know that a song is not supposed to change the world. Neither is a poem, but then how come some of them do? A song is not the face of God, it is words and music. Perhaps a song is love and starts in the womb with the constant pulse of a mother’s heart, the sound of blood as it resonates in our growing forms.

I imagine some days it must be very difficult to perform your songs, the never ending journey back and forth in the solitude of yourself, the moments you carry with you when the song became an idea and the idea formed, the mirrors you must visit and revisit, night after night.

Then maybe it isn’t that way at all. I read an old 2004 interview in Guitar World. In it you said, “To me, the performer is here and gone, the songs are the star of the show, not me.”

It’s like I’m reading this interview and even I can tell, the interviewer is having a conversation with air. You say a lot of things without saying much. You tell us all the things you’ve already told us and still some of us will choose to ignore certain elements and focus on others.

Not to suggest you don’t take an interview seriously, I think most interviewers take them way too seriously. As if they are waiting for the next shoe to fall, they want to squeeze you until the last drop.

I love to read them anyway. I do so with an open mind. I certainly don’t expect you to unbolt the sun or justify the universe to me. I just like to hear what you have to say.

I think you should know though, that when I attend your shows, I don’t think the performer is here and gone at all. I think he’s right there letting his heart out all over us.

Dear Bob Dylan,

A breath of music or of a dream, anything that might make me
almost feel, anything that might make me stop thinking.
             ~Fernando Pessoa

I love Fernando Pessoa. Almost as much as I love you. Simply because everything he says is in accordance with everything he feels. He doesn’t elaborate or exaggerate and because he was such a sad man who claimed to have no sentimental tenderness or compassion yet the tiniest feelings for the tiniest things could torment him for days.

When he worried I think he worried with an unreadable expression and when he cried I bet his eyes were dry.

And words, he was so good with them. He didn’t try to create any illusions. What he wrote came from the center of him.

I imagine you are a lot like him, perhaps without the everyday grief of Pessoa, but with words. How everything you say is in accordance with everything you feel or were feeling at one time. And I think your words open brightly onto a false world and that is why so many are stunned by you. From you, every sparkling affection is brought to life.

People can’t help but to listen. And I can’t help but despair as you say the truth and say it and say it over and over again with words and with music.

I am pretty content to sit and listen to the beautiful country of your voice. And aside from the terrible love I feel, I can try to be happy only knowing you through your voice with its marvelous turns, a cross between stone and a landslide, but I can not will myself to feel content for a lifetime knowing only your voice and not you.

There are days when I like to let things be. Days where I consider myself and who I am and what I am doing, thinking or trying to think that it is possible always to go on this way, living a simple, uninterrepted life, but then I worry I’m not being true to myself. In one breath my attention comes back to you.

Pessoa wrote: Be pure, not in order to be noble or strong, but to be oneself. If you give love, you lose love.

I am willing to lose everything.

Dear Bob Dylan,

Chance is the road you take to get where you want to be. Or as Mark Jacobs, the author, wrote it: Chance is the road you take to get there. He wrote that in a story. He was referring to his character getting a part in a play. Which has nothing to do with any place I want to get to, but I agreed with his line.

Soon very soon I will be seeing you again. Twice. My sister and I bought tickets for the Tucson show, which falls nine days after the Indianapolis show. Why is it I want to rush up to every stranger I see, grab them by the shoulders and shake them while shouting, only five weeks, three days, two hours and fifty six minutes until I see Bob Dylan!

One of the best moments is when you first walk out on stage. When there is barely enough light to discern your hat as the person below it, you, makes his way and us, the crowd, roar in astonishment. Oh, I am a fugitive of that moment.

I love how no time is wasted as you and the guys go right into song. I feel netted in. Secure. This huge wave of relief. He’s here. He’s here. I’m not dreaming.

It all goes by so quickly then. Music, your voice, harmonica, you, gone just like that.