Dear Richard,

Wondering what to do with all the books I promised you when I’m done
with them. Now you’re gone. What am I to do? I just finished that
book I’d bought in London. Terry Jones’s Medieval Lives. Who would
expect such a history book from a comedian. And remember, how we’d
joked about reading Butler’s Lives of the Saints (4 vols., c. 1756). How
we wondered what Terry and the Monty Python troupe might make of it
all. Anyway, I woke up this morning in quite a tizzy worried about books.
Oh, and I’ve been meaning to ask. Are you angry you didn’t have the time
to finish the books you are reading? Have you taken tango lessons lately?
Are they offered? Allowed? Well, here I am out walking without a pen,
nothing to write on. I try to write in my head. Something short. Somehow,
things go on. I still write a haiku every day. Exercise, sleep. All that. But
what am I to do? Do you ever imagine yourself entering a room? Just to
look around, see who’s there? Was it you walking in front of me speaking
in the garden in tango tirades? Teasing bees off of thistles? Teaching
those yellow butterflies their moves?

A day doesn’t say
there’s a spider there’s a tree
nor coffee nor bee

A good story, a fine
song any dance in any
light worth this moment

CX Dillhunt was born in Green Bay. He lives in Madison and is the editor of Hummingbird: Magazine of the Short Poem.