Dear Jeanne-Claude I loved that orange hair.
Dear Jeanne-Claude everyone always remembers his name and not yours, even me too sometimes.
Dear Jeanne-Claude I thought the Gates were beautiful.
Dear Jeanne-Claude I wanted so badly to go see them, and I didn’t probably because of money, and how very foolish that seems now. What did I do in turn? How much beer was drunk on porches in Mississippi, beer bottles clanking and chinking into garbage cans instead of boots crunching Central Park snow.
Dear Jeanne-Claude my friend Jackie went and a boy who was a writer gave her a sliver of saffron fabric, a tiny little square, and I just about swooned myself, altho’ I cannot recall her reactions, just that neon shape in her pink hand.
(Dear Jeanne-Claude you taught us that it was saffron but all I ever saw were the threads of your wild, taunting mane, the ponytail of a lady Galactus twisted and woven through the grey heart of a City)
Dear Jeanne-Claude maybe when I get older and learn how to keep the blush down from my cheeks I’ll lie to children not alive yet that I went that winter to Central Park and that it was so lovely I
burst into tears,
And that a pretty puzzled girl offered me her handkerchief.
Later we had drinks, and we went and saw Yo La Tengo at the Knitting Factory, and even though we swapped e-mails for a while, and she was
totally hot, I can’t really remember her name anymore.
Dear Jeanne-Claude it will be a lovely lie,
Dear Jeanne-Claude it was a lovely life,
you taught me to see saffron instead of
just orange.
This reads like the unholy love child poem of Frost’s “Road” and Ginsberg’s “America,” which means that it is awesome.
Lovely thoughts.