Dear Audrey

Dear Audrey,

God is dead. There is no evidence that he ever existed.

Dear Audrey,

You needn’t make your mind a coffin.

You glimpsed cold infinity in your breakfast cereal and

you felt the peripheral itch of what is unknown.

Standing by the sea you thought you counted angel wings between your toes, but

then you asked,

How many calories in banana bread?

Why should I be a doctor?

Where do we go from here?

These thoughts are not dead bodies.

Dear Audrey,

Instead think of your mind as a fertile swamp where

dwell your monsters of creation.

They may gnash with their teeth as the sides of your skull,

they may rip and make raw your pulpy thought-tissues. stop,

stop, you say, stop.

They will not stop.

You make your eyes hyphens,

your mouth is a stone;

you see black-red-black.

Red. Black.

But from the bloody mud rise

alphabets and ashtrays,

spectacles, and bits of string, and piano keys.

Dear Audrey,

Last night I stood by the edge of the Hudson and

lit a cigarette.

Autumn is here and it is beautiful;

I made it so.

(2008)