"When winds reach wet hands
To take you spinning with random paper
Down back street gutters, under straining bridges
To clogged rivers.
It's this:
The time of year, along with spring,
When poets must take care
Not to sing the same old songs
Stolen from tribal memory."
- Thomas R. Drinkard

I need mittens, icy hands. I need clarity of vision, for this poem, this All Souls Day poem I began a year ago. I walk my way into it, in the frost and chill. Trying to let this impulse work its way out. It’s with me all day, working its way out, if not on paper, then in my head; and I could abandon it, let it go, but I don’t give up on it yet. Perhaps I will end by putting it away, letting it stew for another year. In the afternoon, I go to a memorial service for a childhood friend, a neighbor who has died by suicide. We are not in our childhood shapes any more, but we are still recognizable to each other. I embrace one of my closest childhood playmates, a cousin of the deceased; I have seen her one other time in forty years, and as she crosses the room, stands in front of me, in her womanly grown shape, I say, instinctively, her name. Judy. And I am happy to see her. But I say the strangest thing: Do you remember how we fought? And she says, “I remember how we played.” And then I feel so grateful she has said it just that way. I never liked to fight. But we did. More than once. It was horrible to wound each other, and I don’t know why we did. I remember dancing in your bedroom, she says next, and I’m glad for that too. I have many dark memories from my visits to her house, a scary place. I am so glad to see her, happiness in both our lives. Except the sadness of this occasion, this tragic loss. When I crossed the meadow this morning, the vines were bright gold along the gloomy edge where the trees and shrubs grew wild. And I thought about my poem, and the place in it where the “I" – the speaker of the poem, is afraid to look into the hidden place. Afraid of what lurks in the shadows. I have been afraid to look in the shadows of my psyche. And yet, I have done much of this work, years of it behind me. I looked into the places I didn’t want to look, and I have found some gold and freed it.