To Whom It May Concern

In Autumn, as in Spring, the sap flows, the sap wishes to race against heartbeats before the winter, before the winter buries us in her usual shroud of ice. I turn to you knowing that unrequited love is good for poetry, knowing that pain will nudge the muse as well as anything, knowing that you are afraid, fettered to a life you do not love, & so unfree that freedom seems more fearful even than the familiar business of being a grumbling slave. I lived that way once, & I know that freedom is its own reward, that it propagates itself by means of runners, that nobody gives it to you, not even me to you, but that you must seize it with your own two quaking hands & pluck the strawberry it bears in the green ungrumbling Spring.