Dear Daniel,   By the riveryou and I might someday stand,two familiarities, friends partedby placeand time.      Where am Iis a question I’m trying outdaily, but it does not rightthe self, nor find me. Yesterday I looked upa gray bird in a bookabout gray birds, discoveringI’d seen it before.                                                Yesterday I found two blue gloves,like those I’d lost long ago,palm to blue palmat the edge of the road.                                                             We have never heldhands, though I imagine ustwo wizened codgers wobblingdown Constitution Avenue—                                                                 “Put out your hand,isn’t there an ashtray, suddenly, there?”You know where I’m going . . .                                                                                 We circled a park once,orbiting away from that statueof a favored president, at his feeta row of grateful supplicants.We did not want to get closer                                                                 but let history hiss at our backs,wishing each manstood at his own center, wishingeach man stood as a man.                                                                     We did not want to get closer,but I remember the row of their handspraising or, had we notknown history, pleading                                                                     for one fair word from anotherstone-faced tyrant.                                                I remember walking with youand remember remembering a certain song,to “have taught . . .                                                most violent ways . . .” Who is the teacher,who the student? In schoolwe loved to use the word “research”                                                                                 as if it freed us from complicity,as if the archive were not a mirror.You died too soon. Now, heaven, like a nation,“is the same people living in the same place.”                                                                                                                  You’d say,“heaven is also a prison.” It is a conversationbetween what we’ve readnot what we feel; then who are we                                                                                                and what do we know?I know your voiceis a kind of heaven. The truth isyour voice doesn’t exist                                                                            even here, this pagethat is neither heaven nor nationbut a form                            of thinking,ache, whim, beyond                                                             reason, and so perhaps better,what we call a poem: first stormof the year, winter berries frozento the thinnest branches,          new holly trees.                                    What to do with this grief?This letter I never sent?              Pleasetell Katherine I read the Catullusand made here salad. Again I forgotthe dill. When will I learn?                     I write you out of time.