“I can do that for them. Take them out for a night on the town. I know a place with a mechanical bull. I know more than one with bullet holes in the walls.”

“Okay, but writers, poets especially, use language. They use it in unexpected, fresh, expressive ways.”

“Then I know some guys who cuss a lot and they’re poets.”

I thought that this was entirely possible. “How about this: there’s times you feel like singing? But you know you can’t carry a tune. And you can’t play the piano or guitar or anything else. There’s no radio. No nothing. A poet is somebody who can still make music.”

Gil considered this. She didn’t look exactly convinced. “I guess they just aren’t singing my song.”

I didn’t have any afternoon duties, so I hurried to get some lunch and try to find out how Viridian’s morning workshop had been. I saw Barb sitting by herself in the dining hall and writing in a notebook. When I came up to her, she closed it with a snap.

“Jesus, relax, I’m not trying to read over your shoulder.”

“Sorry.” She did look sorry, at least a little. “This place can be so intense, you have no idea. There are people who run on ego like it’s jet fuel. So competitive.”

I thought that competition was probably Barb’s song. It gave her that battling edge, that intensity of purpose that served her well, even if it didn’t exactly make her mellow company. I was trying not to look at her forbidden notebook and I can’t say I liked the view of her goofy pink eyeglasses that resembled stoplights on some alien planet. I said, “How was the workshop this morning?”

“Terrific. She was terrific. Calm, careful, kind. No. None of that. There were times she’d be, I guess you could say, indirect, you know, there wouldn’t be a straight line from what was on the page to what she started in talking about. But you know what, she’d wrap it all together by the end and you could see what she meant, how one line in a poem can echo through so many different rooms. I guess you had to be there,” she finished, giving up on trying to explain it to my inadequate self. She said that Viridian and Sacha and Anders had gone down to the river to swim, and I could find them there.