Letter to Allen Dugan, May 20th, 1974

Dear Alan,

In the middle of nowhere. eating stolen greens. drinking the whiskey I brought with me and not the lightning available in these parts. My boss made me take my crew two hundred miles from home, way in the hills, to find the old cornerstones. It will take me a week. I wish I had time to write. My wife is painting a lot, and I'm getting jealous of her good work.

In several weeks I'll be heading down to the monastery to help the monks take care of under-privileged boys for ten days. Strange to be there with kids from the city and South America and so on. Don't know how to treat them. Don't know about the cities like you.

If you look in those periwinkle oddities and magazines, you're liable to see my work. Ha Ha.

I don't know if you all are in Paris, New York, or where, but have a good time and dream: especiallv about what I saw in the creek the other day: old deers in water, stained glass and all.

That R. D. Skillings sent me a letter about your place, and since Ginny is a painter she was hoping, but I knew there was no way we could send off to see if we could come; money and all that, etc. Hell, I might make it up there one of these days, but tell R. D. Skillings thanks.

Hell, I'm eating out of the garden every day. Everything is growing. I come home from work, eat turnips, drink pot liquor tea for the blood, eat my strawberries with goat milk and bee honey (makes me dream, fuck, and write), then drink ice water, ever so lightly mixing it with bourbon.

I've got to go to work before long, hoping to finish by the week-end. But I need to tell you, ask you something. That bunch of monks and boys are publishing a magazine. and since you and two others are the contemporary poets they study, I'm supposed to ask you for a poem for it. Who in the hell would want to give a poem to a monastery, to a bunch of strange boys and monks. Nobody except they would ever run across it, so you could donate one you intend to publish somewhere else. They'd love it.

Better get some sleep so I can work and go home.

Yours,

Frank

Allen Dugan