Sitting here smoking a ¼ last night’s cigar and savoring the book—as I will always savor it, it is endless with endless little touches, and looking at the jacket now—the way it works around the cover, the marble paper over our sandman skeleton, and do thank (for me) Chevrier and Salantrie for their fine work. The jacket I cannot figure out, how it has this antique quality and I do not figure it out, it would be like tearing a rose, formulas do not interest me, it is the thing being there like the sun that warms me. I do not think there will ever be another event in my life like this book, and I keep thinking of the years drunk in the alleys, of the 3 years I sat in the same Philly bar on the same barstool from 6 or 7 a.m. in the morning until 2 a.m. the next morning, staring down at the wood, listening to nothing, maybe, and now7 this book, this book, this book out of nothing like somebody saying, see, it is not nearly all bad. I know how close you must come to dying in fighting from all nothingness of poverty, hoping on luck, a break from the sky, kinder landlords, praying typefaces do not break, that somebody will send a dollar for paper, that somebody will buy a postcard or a painting from Gypsy, that the body will hold up, that the landlord will smile, that cars will not run you over, everything everything, so please do not say that your blood is “more like the pseudo-stuff that bleeds from the madras tissue between pages 96 and 97.” I know better and the living people of the world know better. Don’t make me sad; the miracle is yours; you have drowned me in honor, and no matter what cheap hotel, what jail, what grave is there for me, they can never take away the miracle.

I would like to say that the people who have seen the book are as taken with it as I and that the last page which begins “777 copies of this book…” is one of the best poems, if not the best poem in the book.

A little sadness here—and I thought I’d tell you before anybody else told you—in the poem “Dinner, Rain & Transport”, one line was left out, “I can prophecy evil,” this was to proceed “with the force of a jackhammer.” And when I say a little sadness I know it will be mostly yours, for to me the book is so much that this makes no difference, so please don’t blame yourself for being also real enough to error. [* * *]

[To Ann Bauman]

December 4, 1963

Like the American provincial, I start my letter: “I have been meaning to write but—”