for Lucie Brock-Broido

We moved a few moments
into the office filled
with ghost orchids and a breeze.
You said commit
every night to sitting
in your dress like a rain
drop in Dickinson's
lighthouse, practicing
what it means to have met her
before you were born.
It must have been
in Amherst, I thought,
or inside an echo,
asphodels everywhere,
or on my slow walks
into town to ask whoever
why he bothered naming
this particular time
known as afternoon.
Then, a few weeks later
you asked me to buy
goldfish and pinot gris.
Gladly I rose and did,
thinking I'll carry them
back to the lighthouse.
Never had I seen
so much crimson,
so many white leaves,
and felt in touch
with so many sentient deer.
It sounds so strange
not to be true, but truly
for several minutes
I stood in your kitchen
feeling the lives
of grazing animals 
move through me.
I was only pretending
in those days to write. Now
this particular forsaken
night hour I realize
you were that rare
celestial optimist
who found inwardly
the orbic music we know
only from mountains,
also you loved talking
on the telephone
outside the veterinarian's
office, I'm forgetting
all poets never die,
your mind continues,
it is the grass.

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In her essay, "On Secrets," Mary Ruefle says Dickinson "wrote 1,775 secrets, on tiny pieces of white paper, many of which were folded into notes, the kind you used to pass in high school. The kind of notes lovers in the Imperial Court of tenth-century Japan—which constituted a city—exchanged, using messengers, and Emily often did exactly what they did: attached flowers to the outside of the note, flowers representative of the season, or of the sentiments folded within." Equally as important as the poem, is the person the poem is for: the address or addressee. This always seems to be the case, as much as people try to tell themselves otherwise. If I don't have someone that I'm writing a poem for, I don't have the poem. In other words, poems are always people, walking around, starting up conversations, passing notes, and concealing and revealing their lives. I've been trying to commemorate the person of poetry for some time; this has been a great joy.