There is a connection between when I started to write poetry, or at least had come to an awareness that I could wholeheartedly apply myself to writing, and my father's illness. How this connection can be made explicit is difficult to summarize. There were times during my sophomore year of college, before the diagnoses, where he would call to chat at five in the morning, or suddenly appear at my dorm room (a two hour drive into Iowa from Wisconsin) on a Tuesday afternoon with the full expectation of going out to lunch. Later, watching him fold laundry, each item, be it a t-shirt or a pair of socks would be placed into a separate pile, the last pile seemingly forgotten about so that the laundry room was completely covered in a single layer of neatly folded clothes. "That's a good way of explaining it," my mother told me during dinner.
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I signed up for a poetry writing class during the second block of my senior year. At first I was stunned by the idea that you could write whatever you wanted to write. I followed some step by step exercises: a line about a person's hands, what they were doing with their hands, a metaphor involving a place, a question to ask this person and the person's answer. I thought of my friend Aric and our later high school summers spent together in the graveyard, sitting across from each other in a freshly landscaped gully passing a dirty metal pipe and making jokes. The last line of the poem read, "Because I need that as much as you, could I get that back?"
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After the first time I ever wrote a poem, unprompted, from start to finish, I had the most lucid dream I had ever had. It was large and perverse, moving through different places, brick walkways and houses; I saw everyone I ever knew and it went on and on. Eventually I ended up on a darkened suburban street, dark houses and a fear to go inside. I found a friend, Tony, and asked him to let me out of the dream. I grabbed him and shook him, and there I woke myself up. I got up, turned on the light and called Amy. She humored my excitement and listened. The next day I met with Liz, my poetry teacher, and told her that I wanted to be a writer, firmly convinced that the dream was a newly discovered sense exercising itself while I slept. Three years later I took some morphine pills and felt amazingly light, like I was gliding across the ground. A couple weeks after that I dreamt of floating through the rafters of a white adobe dome.
