The vocabulary of my poems is elemental, too, but not especially soothing. More hallucinatory, narcotic; from the poets I’ve been reading I’ve learned to employ images in my poems, objects which serve as vessels of feeling I couldn’t name. They recur from poem to poem, diamonds and thunderclouds, pearls and chandeliers, maps and smoke. They aren’t good poems, far from it, but they betray a certain precocious intoxication with language, an enchantment with style—or at least an ability to learn the style of the hour, and copy it fiercely. And there’s something more here, too, perhaps: evidence of an inner life, the uncharted landscape of within, which seems as various as the desert, its night equally blue and fragrant, awash with stars.

A poet whose work I’ve read comes to my creative writing class at Rincon; it seems a minor miracle, that Charles Simic should be sitting there, in our basement room, on a plain Tuesday morning. I own his book Dismantling the Silence, and I love both the collage on the cover (blood vessels conjoined, in a surrealist marriage, to the parts of a machine) and the cool and dreamy poems within: Simic goes inside a stone and reads the star charts on the inner walls; he listens to what the grass says, he takes apart silence as though it were a huge piece of furniture.

And now here he is, the dreamer in the flesh. He’s in town to give a reading at the university, and Dick Shelton has made sure he’s come to visit here. My teacher says, “Mark, would you read Mr. Simic one of your poems?”

I do. He leans back in his chair, appraising, eyes on me; he listens intently, taking every phrase in. There’s a pause, when I’m done, which seems to me quite a long one. And then he leans forward, nodding, his round little glasses glinting in the light. In his lush eastern European accent he says, “Read me another one,” which is the very best thing he could say, the perfect thing.

I’ve come from school, she’s in her room with that drunk, lost look on her face; it’s an ordinary day. She actually seems to shrink when she drinks, as if her being were all concentrated in her face, and the effort of all that intensity somehow diminished the rest of her.

I’ve gone to my room to put away my books, my notebook covered with inked peace signs and slogans, the denim jacket whose back I’ve embroidered in swirls of silky floss. Then she calls me out into the hall. She says, Son, come on out here.