“With,” the opening poem of my recent book (Enduring Freedom), haunted me—in pieces: notes, drafts, scrawled repetitions—longer than I knew. Though I recalled that the central image had been given to me (in 1990 or ‘91 Katherine Thompson had the dream of her wedding dress as a pile of ashes) my memory of the poem had me writing it somewhat quickly. But my friend Nancy Lance just sent me, out of the blue, this photo of a draft I’d given to her in ’95 or so (accidentally, on the back of another note), and then, in the same week, I opened a notebook from sometime in the 90s and found the lines again, with a sketch of the poem’s beginning. (I must’ve thought the poem would go in Murmur, at that point.) I like the fact that I kept writing pretty much the exact same phrase over and over: I was so faithful to that “faithless…”
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