Letter to Mike Cuddihy, December 30th, 1974

Dear Mike,

As I was digging potatoes this evening such a great thought came: try applying the theory of time to poetry, poetry thought. dreamt, and in motion.

If we could think or dream, sending out a fleet of poems at the speed of light, or approaching the speed of light, what would we actually be doing. If a poem could travel the same distance light could in a year, then a poem I would launch now would be 15 years old and passing thru this galaxy's edge and I would have been dead 45,000 years. There is something to all this and death.

For about four hours I haven't been able to finish what I was saying. It is dark and raining and fog. Soon it will be light.

I got waylayed by a thought.

The destination of any poem departing for an eternity is another infinity, but I feel as if we are points of interception for our own poems. Depending on the arc or degree of curve a poem or dream would pass back through us, but at what time I don't know. The faster the poem the sooner our death. As the time increases from the point of our deaths, the further are our poems.

It is very difficult to write about this, so I will turn to other things. The money you sent we bought our garden seeds with.

Can't get off the subject. What's so strange is the poem "the burial ship." I wrote when thinking the same think I'm thinking now.

Wish I could write a decent letter but this thought won't let me. I'll be keeping in touch as soon as I can concentrate.

Yours,

Frank

Mike Cuddihy