Morning. I feel my hair feathering the sides of my face, a sensation I don’t like but can’t remedy because I’ve lost my hair clip. When I do find it, a section keeps falling out because it’s too short to reach the clip. I locate a smaller clip and ensnare that section separately from the rest. I look like I have tree stuff stuck in my hair, the fluffy, seedy matter that forms before the leaves do and litters streets when it’s shed to make way for actual leaves, actual spring, actual warmth, actual hope, whatever hope is these days, actual or otherwise.

I have to find my earplugs now because my fifty-five-year-old husband is playing a video game at 6 a.m., and I can hear him clicking the controller. CLICK CUCLICK CLICK CLICK CUCUCLICK. There’s no pattern to the clicking that I can settle into, make sense of. I feel like someone’s strumming my ribs with their nails.

Now, the refrigerator is trying to get out of its body as it does for several minutes every morning, poltergeisting the entire kitchen with its WAWUM WAWUM WAWAWAWAWUM. I used to have a wooden rabbit on top of the fridge, but it would vibrate off to the left side whenever these hauntings occurred. I didn’t like seeing it askew, putting it back, and seeing it askew again. At some point, we have to stop engaging in repeated patterns that will never change, never turn out any different. So no more wooden rabbit.

Oh, good. The refrigerator has gone silent, as if it’s been practicing self-soothing techniques. Cry it out, fridge. Cry it out. Breathe or whatever you do.

This is not the morning I want. I want om tare tuttare ture soha playing quietly while I read my new David Ray book. I want to sink into that sadness and silence and away from the furniture banging around in my skull. David, I have taken the counsel of trees / and wise enough to wait for dawn. I’ve waited and woken into all the things. I’ve taken my thyroid medication and had my morning zero-sugar soda and gentled my dog into the morning alongside me and plopped myself down in front of this big window that looks out into the wildlands surrounding Tucson. And David, you used to live here. And David, you lived in Kansas City where I lived. And David, Studs Terkel loved you. And William Carlos William loved you. And you were at one time one of the most celebrated poets in the United States. And now?

You’ve only just died, David. Last December at age 92. I knew before I picked up this book that you were gone. Somehow I knew, though I hadn’t read the news. But here you are on these pages. How can I call you dead? Let me tell you about the things in my head, David. All that furniture that lives inside sound. My husband’s clicking. His footfalls. The sound of him urinating right now with the bathroom door open. Pouring coffee. Clearing his throat. Opening a door. Closing a door. I love him, David. I do. But I am at the edge of the forest. I came there, as you did. Is the darkness before me, behind me, or all around me?

All of the above.

You’ve gone the way every one of us will go: into obscurity and into everything. Being lauded means nothing in the end. Living a certain way, writing a certain way, means everything. Good morning, David. Thank you for the gift of your “light music” over this scene.