P.S. Please bring Errington with you. I am lonely for him. He wants to see his old sleeves which I have made into pillows for my bed.

Te amo,
Rhoda

Dear Malcolm,

Now it is seven days. One week. The way we divide up time but time seems different in different times. Now it seems like water that never moves or waiting for rain.

We had the most amazing English class yesterday. The new teacher the dean got me is the best teacher I’ve ever had anywhere. His brain spins out in six or seven directions and he asks the most amazing questions. He’s been around the world twice. He quit everything he was doing when he was twenty-one and bummed his way around the world. He said he couldn’t presume to teach until he knew where he was in space and time. Now I think the only reason I moved to Dunleith and came to Tuscaloosa was to be in the presence of this man. Yesterday he spent the whole class on one poem. First he passed it out to us and let us read it. Then he read it out loud twice. It is called “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” I think you could keep on thinking about it the rest of your life and never completely understand it. Mr. Whitehead said he reads it every year and each year it seems to be about something entirely different but the images stay exactly the same. Here is a line from it, “Once a fear pierced him, in that he mistook the shadow of his equipage for blackbirds.”

There is another part that goes, “A man and a woman are one. A man and a woman and a blackbird are one.” “Among twenty snowy mountains the only moving thing was the eye of the blackbird.” I am going to write my term paper on Stevens. God, he might be the only poet I read all winter. “One must have a mind of winter to regard the frost and the boughs of the pine-trees crusted with snow; and have been cold a long time. …” God.

Thirty minutes have gone by. I just want to hold you in my arms forever. Maybe this is too much for you. I don’t know any other way to be in love.

Hurry, love,
Rhoda

Dear May Garth,

Thanks for the note and the picture of Randolph Macon. I’m sorry you got shipped off there and I’m sorry you almost got raped by a football player from V.M.I. I really miss you and think of you when I walk by the Tri Delt house.