Dear Bob Dylan,

I’ve been writing you a lot lately. I’m not troubled, just thinking and growing fast.

So, the sky is ineffably quiet and beautiful this evening. Earlier, some rain. You surely can imagine what a city in the middle of a desert is like when it tastes some rain. You’re in Kansas City tonight. Such fond memories of seeing you there a couple of years ago. There really isn’t poem enough at all to describe the feeling. You were so lovely. Beyond words.

Of course, a great poem is certainly attainable, but a poem about you is impossible.

Dear Bob Dylan,

Well, Bob, by this letter I am writing to say nothing but that it is August 25th and seemed to me a day good as any.

I’ve been keeping track of your tour, set lists, reviews. I was thrilled to see you played your opening song on guitar in both Elizabeth and Evansville, Indiana. I wish I’d been there.

It’s not enough to read the reviews.

I am so full of uncertainty tonight that I am beyond forgiveness. Every night is a caution, but this one more so, only because my life has been washed and worn so many times even I, its soul(s) owner, doesn’t know whether to turn left or right.

And after all these months I am still worth loving and leaving as a barstool. I want to spare you any explanation. For many reasons, I follow your life, or that which is written about you and that which is what I can insinuate myself into, concerts mostly. Concerts only, actually. I number my commitments and run out of fingers.

I like a coincidence as much as anybody and so my heart is quite a beating thing when it crawls across the fifty dozen fans in front of me. As if it had a brain and limbs and the passion to carry it through to the end. My body stands here, my heart earnest on finding your shoe before dying of exposure, often diving ten feet horizontally to reach you.

Love, I wish you all the best. Sweet sleep and better habits and the calm of snow and the fresh outburst of tears if the feeling demands it. Love, I wish you some time to gather your own, rest assured the fans will always be there.

I hope San Diego shows us some kind weather. I am delighted already just thinking about you in your hat and coat.

Play what is uppermost in your mind.

Dear Bob Dylan

You wake up one morning under the sudden blue and the world, that worked over playground, no longer approves of you. Here is the same house with all the same things, just as you left them, but every angle brings upon them a different light. The dew clinging to the vine even, glides down with a new uncertainty. The body feels it. The mind, when taken away, knows amiss when it sees it.

I live, each day, with a shoe in my mouth. Afraid to speak, then when I do, stepping into a something like a symptom of my disease. It’s enough to make me apologize for every second I’m alive. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be here.

Same goes for change. I understand it’s necessary. I, for the most part, accept it. But only as an end to things, not so much as a beginning. It’s like trees. The way they display their problems with pockmarked leaves. Perhaps I display mine by not knowing what to write or what position to take. I often think I’d be a more capable person if delegated to a side street in some miniature town somewhere. I could be a leader of change then. You, pick up that empty cola bottle. You, over there, sweep the gutter. You, fix the lights. You, align each garbage can exactly one inch, two centimeters from the curb.

The woman I used to be is still here. The one who used to help count the bag man’s can of change, to see if there was enough for a bottle of Boone’s. The one who cried when she witnessed an accident on Ellsworth road, an elderly woman oversaw her turn and hit the signal pole. The one who used to run amok when she heard a new tour announced and spent her last long dollar on airfare. Didn’t matter how she got there as long as she was there.

Lately, I can’t seem to muster the same impulse. Evening comes and I close my eyes, thinking, evening isn’t everything. Morning comes and I’m caught awake, already feeling, morning doesn’t mean that much to me.

Then daybreak indulges me with sunlit inspiration. Then a song gives way.

Once again, you are at the center. Faithful as always, like a daisy growing in the middle of a sidewalk, head full of bloom and pretty as a kiss.

Dear Bob Dylan,

I bought my ticket for San Diego.

Simple things, nothing else, make me happy. Possessing a ticket to one of your shows, even when it is now I long to hear you, September is not far off, and knowing this, well, it makes me happy in a stunning way. Like snow falling very late at night, when the sky is black and the only thing illuminating is moonlight. Almost as if the world were at an angle just right for the one person glimpsing out a window.

It’s a silent joy, no man or situation could vandalize.

I sometimes wonder why you bother. With so much popularity, though it isn’t actually popularity you own, but mystery. Where else is there to go? If you’ve already reached the top, even if the top were turned inside out and upside down with moats around it and iron fences, the world would still be collapsed in some fetal position & at your beck and call.

I could forgive myself every idea I’ve ever had in which I was transient and did nothing about it, if I could find a way to you beyond the mixture of time and place, the capriciousness of others, the alienation of you versus us, the common folks or fans as is often our label, as if your coding for things differs from my coding for things, as if your neurons harbor a vaster inner-scope than mine, or say other aspects of your thinking life provoke impressions that mine, unreliably, lose in a cortex battle.

Yesterday the sun shone on the city from a sky that seemed to come from grief. Clouds hovered than skirted off. Rain threatened but superfluously. I noticed but did what pleased me anyhow.

Tonight it is darker than I have ever known. The moon can not be found. The stars have all gone off to spend the night in some foreign vista. My daughter is ill with fever and asleep. My son is too old and occupied for my company. My husband is a collage of phantom shapes I keep having flashbacks of.

I’ll round the bend at any rate.

I love “Dreaming of You“. October 7th to me, is a date of expansion. Tell Tale Signs is a great title. Makes me think of colliding into definitions. I’ll try to interpret them from the amused voice of my heart.

I was remembering last July. Seeing you in Indianapolis. Flying to a strange city for the sole purpose of watching you perform. I will remember October too. I will dress for it and wait for it, gut sprung on love’s wheels.