from A Letter, Written to Miss L. in My Head While In Key West

Dearest-my-friend,
the thought of you and your ambitious summer plans and appetite for literature and good poems inspired me to try and hold on even when my brain had gone all sleepy and numb so i fought to remember: what were all those poems that coursed down my face early as i walked and sweated under the huge cloud formations in view of the sea? I will try to remember and if i cannot oh what will you say? You will smile and shake your head and say "child, thoughts can be as whorled as the shells tumbled in the surf and their beauty sometimes eludes us like a wave snatching back its treasure. Only some shells stay on shore long enough to hurt your feet, and only some thoughts form long enough for their beauty to cut into you. Just write down what you can, silly girl. That's all you can do."

So i heard you say that in my head and it was less lonesome and then i lay and for a while thought about the book Killer Angels and the Civil War. I lay, sweaty and dreamily happy with stars in my eyes at the great deeds of Chamberlain and Kerlain and Tom and Meade and Hood and the tragedy of Lee and Longstreet and the soft decaying dead and the rank smell and the fierce eagles that watched Gettysburg destroyed. I lay on a white beach in the south, in the Deep South of Florida and there are no slaves or weeping slave children, but just Americans and it is an odd feeling, stepping out of the heat of that horrible, exulting time back onto the beach of America. I feel stretched and breathless, like i have been in the grip of some thrilling fever....battle-blood.

These men are in my heritage.

I want to be a warrior.

(Isn't it remarkable how books make you think bigger thoughts and dwell on greater truths than you are actually capable of doing? They are mind-stretchers, laboring with pick and axe to hew out enough complacent ignorance so there is room for doubt and questions and homegrown, original thoughts).