February 2, 2020
Dear Samina,
Friend, colleague, mentor, fellow writer, I’m so happy you’re adding your voice to this tapestry of reflections. It’s an honor.
I have to tell you: a few days ago, I received a letter from my dad, a response to the one I wrote him last summer, after we journeyed together to Gila River. It floored me. I flashed to the pieces you wrote about your father, reflections from a daughter on the tidal-storms of grief, in the wake of loss. With my dad’s letter, I felt time tunneling to a single point: the past collapsing into the present—my grandparents suddenly alive again and my father, suddenly, gone. I felt into a future without him, for the first time in my adult life. Why did the writing do this? These letters, these correspondences—with family, with ghosts, with fellow poets—become ever more mysterious to me. They’re alive and timeless, like memory.
You’ve shown me so much in this short time we’ve known each other. I remember the moment of our meeting: on stage, during the Q&A you facilitated after Nikiko and I performed Hold This Stone, before I even knew there was the possibility of our being colleagues one day. Now I am home, re-rooting myself in Fresno, in this valley, trying to understand my place here, “one woman / Like and unlike so many, fooled as to her destiny, the scope of / Her task,” as Adrienne Rich writes (in the poem that made me want to be a poet!). “Minerals, traces, rumors I am made from, morsel, minuscule / Fibre,” goes the poem, closing with: “Where are we moored? / What are the bindings? / What behooves us?”
Where are we moored—
A question I ask, daily, waking “to the burnt-out dream of innocence" (Rich again), a phrase with such import now, in this moment, in this country.
Tell me, friend, what is moving you—mooring you—in this moment?
With gratitude for your words—the wisdom there,
Brynn
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