June 24, 2025

a stranger writes to tell me he likes my poem

says he’s a jazz pianist in Boston, has a standing gig each month
in what he calls “a listening room with a good piano.” Of course,
the space between us had already narrowed—the poem arriving 
in his inbox the previous morning from a woman named Stephanie.
He likes it, this poem about wild chickens, which I wrote because of
a conversation with Tina last week, when we challenged ourselves 
to use the news headline I’d saved in a file I keep on my desktop 
when I can’t think of anything to write. Every month, Bert says, 
he reads a poem while the rest of the band improvises—sax, bass, drums. 
He asks my permission to share the wild chickens with the group,
and it’s kind of like when you see a kid learning to ride a bicycle, 
or you come home after a long day and discover fireflies have arrived
and are pixelating your front yard, or someone drops off a loaf of
banana bread, just because, or the cat plops herself on your chest, 
turning your heart into soft butter. Something to tell you 
the world hasn’t actually fallen apart, and that your strange little 
offering wasn’t for nought. “Dear Bert,” I write, because we’re on a first-
name basis, “I’m delighted my poem found its way to you.” I picture
a warm draft formed by the bird that carries wild chickens above
the cloud layer from Maine to Massachusetts. I imagine the lines 
unspooling in tenor notes and percussion, deep twangs of string. 
Maybe it would have been enough to cajole a poem out of a headline.
Enough for a quartet of musicians to gather on the regular to improvise.
Enough to hope that there’s life above the cloud layer and the thing you love
might be loved by someone else. But when Bert writes, “yours in harmony”
and Tina writes “touchstone” and that night, a chorus of fireflies erupts
into their next summer, it is the opposite of small, which is to say
that larger trouble you’d felt advancing like a cataclysmic tumbleweed
looks, from this angle, like a piece of lint you might pinch between
your fingers, then blow away, translucent as dust.