First, I met up with Sonya in the Emerald City, and I had a gas. I’m supposed to write about it for my website (if I don’t, it’s like it didn’t really happen), but it’s too much and too soon and too close and I don’t want to go there because it was the coolest shit that I've done in a long time. I’m worried that if I start with the reflection that I’ll trap myself in the past when the past is past and it is the future that I need to get through. Why start with the nostalgia so soon after the events for which I will probably become too nostalgic?

Then I went to that Premiere Reception for Words in Motion, that PBS special that I was on. It was fun and it meant a lot to me, but, again, it was of the past, of a time and a life that, somehow, don’t influence or affect the present, almost as if those years didn’t happen, and those years were the best years of my life. Strange how that happens, how it holds true for so many.

What do both of these events have in common? Poetry. My life as a poet. I met Es when I was in grad school studying to be a poet in Seattle. At the Words in Motion thing, the Fresno poets who had made me into a writer (who, in other words, made me into me) when I was their student were all there. I’m no good in rooms full of people and I usually can’t relax, but being in that studio and talking to my former professors was the most comfortable that I've ever felt in that type of situation.

Then I get an e-mail from C.G., asking about my book, and I e-mail back and, soon, we plan for me to go to his house for dinner. He was my teacher in a literature course (he introduced me to Roethke, and that, by itself, changed my life) and in many different poetry workshops, all of which were great.

I tend to idealize the past, especially when the present is a mess, but mostly because the past that took place in Fresno was year after year of miraculous happiness, and poetry had a lot to do with it. I am, I’ll admit, a softy, but nobody ever sees that because I’m a little (to very) closed off and a little (to very) risk averse, and C.G. probably doesn’t know how much I loved being his student.

If you’ve ever tried to relax around somebody who gave you your life, to whom you’re impossibly grateful, you’ll know how you feel a little embarrassed just to walk into his house. But this is C.G., the guy who turned me on to Roethke and James Wright and William Trevor, whom he had mentioned in passing. I went to the library and found Trevor’s stories, and I loved them and I love The Story of Lucy Gault, Trevor’s perfect little novel. It was like that; C.G. would mention a writer in class and, because I trusted him so much, I would hunt down that wrtiter’s work. Trevor’s in The New Yorker all the time, and every time that I read one of his stories, I remember Fresno and C.G.’s workshops.

It doesn’t take me long to relax and we talk and eat and talk some more, for nearly three hours. Eventually, it’s time to leave and I’ve got a copy of my book that I’m going to sign and give to him, and I’ve got a copy of his latest book for him to sign for me.

I had long ago given up on having my manuscript published because I’d been sending it around for years with nothing to show for it but a long list of ([brutally] painful) almosts. It was one of the reasons that I had avoided the Fresno poetry community; I didn’t want to be the guy who didn’t have a book when everybody had thought that he would have had a book a long time ago. I had come to think of myself as one of those guys with an MFA who doesn’t ever get to have a book. In the last few years, I had been sending the book out almost on autopilot (It’s September, time to send the book to the contests.), trying to extinguish any bit of hope that it might get accepted for publication so that I wouldn’t hate myself when it wasn’t.

Then I got a call from Gerry C. at Carnegie Mellon, and, just like that, I’ve got a book, and here I am, as I’m getting ready to leave, signing it for one of the people who had a lot to do with its writing. At the same time, he’s signing his book for me.

I didn’t read the inscription until I got to my car. What did C.G. write in the inscription? That’s private, but he did mention my “passion for poetry.” He’s right; there had been a time when I had been passionate about poetry. It was all I had thought about, but I can barely recall that version of myself. Reading and reading whatever I could get a hold of. Carrying four or five books of poetry with me wherever I went. Writing and writing and writing. Loving every minute of the poetry workshop. The best years of my life. It’s not even close.

But then I went to Seattle for my MFA, and that passion started dying. I had been spoiled, I think, by how great Fresno had been, and Seattle never came close to measuring up. Then I graduated and life started giving me a series of pretty serious ass-kickings. Poetry was so far out of my life that I didn’t think it would ever come back. Passion about poetry became something to be embarrassed about, somehow, that I was so passionate about it but that I had had so little to show for that passion. Like loving a girl who doesn't love you.

But then I read that inscription and I was reminded of who I had been and how that was probably the best version of myself. Now, Tuesday night, I wonder how hard it would be to get back to that person I had been. If I am honest, I have to say that it would be impossible. But I can start, I can try.