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.