A postcard from a friend, so jammed with handwriting it's a wonder it found me, mentioned he saw a poem of mine in Hayden's Ferry Review, about a place, a house, we both used to pass on our way to school in nowhere Ohio, how happy he was that someone finally wrote a poem about that house, that sign out in front of it.
I've been thinking about ownership, the idea that an idea belongs to someone, the one who thought it, the one who found it. More likely the one who found it first.
I wonder what his poem would have been like, about the sign. I think I would like it to have been written. I think I would like to read it.
Once a friend took the story I told her, about a poem I was working on, and wrote it before I could finish. Once a boyfriend wrote a story about an event I dreamed. Hearing him read it, at a writing competition winners' luncheon, was like seeing colors explode, events come to life, the movie of my mind. He said at the beginning it was borrowed.
Only an inch of coffee left in the pot in the office this morning.
So an inch it is, lightened with fake cream and real sugar like the coffee milkshakes I used to drink as a child after church. Such mystery...the Styrofoam cups...
