0009 Favorite Poem

and you can’t remember much about the first time you read it except that it held you to the end, but most of all this one line, which seemed to hold the key to the whole poem as if you were opening the closet of your mind to bring out something which you knew was there but instead something way at the back called to you and you remembered a moment from way back you thought you had forgotten and then you read the poem again in company with the poet and yes that’s it, and the two of you became friends for life, almost related. So, now you’ve read all their poems, feel some more than others but as if you wrote them all in the same room where you read them together and you wait for their new book with a sorta family pride and like family, you leave the poems for a spell, grow up a little, then come back to visit - they mean more; can it be, you've both grown? each time you come back to them you carry them more close to you in fact you feel that you could write poems very much like theirs as if you’d inherited, too, the family gift and though you wouldn’t of course seek them out in person except in a reading where you’d have to share their warmth with the rest of their extended family but not say much since you are a, well, close relative, if you happened to be driving a route not far from them, you’d detour, park a little distance from their house, but have it in your sight, hope you might catch a movement, wait a few minutes, then start the car with almost a sigh half relieved that you didn’t have to try on their cautiously polite doorstep to find words to say you love them in their words, which you almost wrote together, lived them together; love them like life itself, love them