Dear Richard,

I've thought about your presence on this earth
so many times I'd be a sissy not to write.
I find your voice coming out in my own work
sometimes; oddly, not so much in these letter
poems you inspired me to write, more so
in the everyday poems that come like sneezes.
I'll write a line and look back at it and say to
myself, "Gee, I think Dick would like that one."
A friend of yours told me 10 years ago that
you showed up for readings, much to
everyone's surprise with no books or papers,
and could speak for hours on end without
skipping a beat. All these years now, I've thought
of you every time I've endeavored to do the same.
Your poems are perfect, Dick, magically
balancing the vital intimacy so critical to
worthy poems with the lyrical and slightly
inexplicable nature of poeticism.
I've often thought that you'd find it quite
perfect too that the White Center where you
were born is now an entrenched Little
Cambodia. No more bars for mill workers
or all-night diners for those on the graveyard shift.
Cambodian restaurants and signs written in
languages very few people on this earth can
actually read. How fitting a defeat. How
uncomfortably perfect that the very designs
our nation started from change its very face
more and more every day. I miss not having
you with us anymore because I'm just so certain
you'd help me, help all of us, make sense of
all the messes we've made somehow, or at least
learn to laugh at them while we try and clean
them up. At the very least, I take comfort in
knowing that you left so many ideas and
beautiful notions behind, so many ways any
of us can learn more about ourselves and
our many various conditions. Until the day
I die, Dick, you will be the only poet who
ever sits on my shoulder, frankly saying,
"Yes, good," and "No, bad, very bad."
Thank you, from the bottom of my heart,
for that guidance, Mr. Hugo, and thank you
for having made the world so much richer
while you lived. All my love, Adam

(2006)