A few days to read

and James,

it’s taken me a few days to read A Few Days, but I have loved every line, especially the way you put things in brackets (this coffee is too strong) and swerve suddenly into memory or loss for what was or wasn’t or just that day’s cologne, it makes me

feel alive and pay attention to what I am doing (or not) myself, like no longer waking to Today, the mornings so peaceful without it, kind of on the edge somehow and somehow as though I missed the meeting (what’s new), but then I

realise my whole life has been like that, the tea maker we bought going through its motions, quiet burblings ending in triumphant noises of steam. I had forgotten that you put Eileen Myles in the poem. I heard her just last week with Paul

Muldoon talking about your White Boat, Blue Boat. You worked for Auden and she worked for you. I wonder who works for Eileen. She read Dissolution, and it seemed essential, like breath, the voice trying its utmost to hold onto all that is

sacred