(An unsent letter, around 10/77)

My whole body is trembling. It isn't only happy, it's sad. Everything that verges on being more than being draws up with it a longing for freedom of feeling and action greater than one could have even imagined just before. And every floating color that vanishes into memory records delicate reflections, representations of actual experience which is the greatest healer and guide. Moments we shared, even re-inventing the pronoun incites a mysterious venturesomeness, a daring that hides in its face the doubts that turn one's head away from the next turn. Only this one may be straight or was straight until we turned back before the trees, before night, into the red tailights and green signs and the door with its quietness behind it. I feel, as I kiss you, I can hold your breathing, I want to laugh till we shake some yellow leaves down, taken down, done down to the deepest kisses imaginable. Saturday did give me a reminder, many reminders of that scent. But I'm back there again. Only I hold your image before my mind, a metaphor of a pronoun, the memory, like the way to open the camera or to load it, the thing in my hands like a wounded animal to be taken to the front of the car. I guess there aren't any photographs that could conjure up the thought teased away by your voice- I must have- you did too- there's we, and a sentence unfolds to depict the whole blue sky and the raining trees. The deepest memories are being remembered and forgotten into the deepest
chambers of memory. Can we find our way back? Can we rewind the tape, wind the film, always with the wind of tomorrow blowing into our faces? Lead us back, find our way to the path through the low bushes across from the off-center main spot of the field on which so softly we spoke- we do it to make them listen as we do- only *once*- and now I'll leave us there, in our jackets, in the October clear sun, high, immersed in each other's thousands of faces.

Love,
Nick