When faced with a blank screen or page, how do you start writing? I mean this literally: how do you begin? This is my lifelong conundrum, and I solve it by secretly assigning myself a random structural form that frees me up and gives me a way in. There’s plenty of room in our Freedom of Form online workshop this Tuesday, August 25. Click here for all the details – I’d love to see you in the room! 

Last week I gathered all my courage and took on The Final Frontier, as I have long referred to the many boxes stuffed full of letters and cards saved from high school on.

There are thousands of them. It is a profoundly absorbing task. Each day I’ve spent two-three hours reading and sorting. All the years flown by, missives from the past selves of everyone I’ve loved in my life, shimmering up on the page.

Now, by Greg Watson

I told you once when we were young that
we would someday meet again.
Now, the years flown past, the letters
unwritten, I am not so certain.

It is autumn. There are toothaches hidden
in this wind, there are those determined
to bring forth winter at any cost.
I am resigned to dark blonde shadows

at stoplights, lost in the roadmaps of leaves
which point in every direction at once.
But I am wearing the shirt you stitched
two separate lifetimes ago. It is old

and falling to ash, yet every button blooms
the flowers of your design. I think of this
and I am happy, to have kissed
your mouth with the force of language,

to have spoken your name at all. 

Click here for more information about Greg Watson. Today’s poem was first published in 2008 by March Street Press and appears in The Distance Between Two Hands. 

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My podcast: Words by Winter