Dear Sarah:

I was reading in Suzuki the other day and he attempted to translate sabi as attaining to a primitive uncouthness. I would like to know if your vortices would bear a family resemblance – if rounded edges and that line from Malkmus about wanting to look poor when you’re 15 resonated, at all.

I won’t deign to stoop to aggrandize. For a bit, at least.

I wrote a letter once to an author with whom you are socially acquainted. This was back in the early-aughts. I had designs on having coffee with her. She may have read, if not gave an imprimatur of approval, this layered utterance: “She was privileged enough to feel at home anywhere, and to equate squalor with authenticity.”

Being alone without feeling alone, and speaking a kind of silence that might otherwise prove corrosive. I wonder if your partner takes that on in reading poetry. Or writing it. Also if the nostril hairs in his nose get to you yet.

Vortices and concatenations, the currency in which you traffic, carry so much of the meaning that sits behind my tongue, like dammed water, and I don’t know where to begin to let it seep. It is said that your mind guillotines this from that without having to think too much, an accordion of separate, but connected concepts, that you cogitate and cogitate and cogitate away. Is a sculptor a monkey grinder? Does being awarded something for being a genius lessen the dull cramp of envy that pulsates inside even so generous a heart as yours?

I like that you like tangerines. That procreation neither defines nor obstructs what the next work may be. That the foxes you depict are both ravenous and sprightly. That you can be precise and accurate, simultaneously.

Did you ever read the Inferno? The souls whose heads are munched on by other souls, in a kind of circle-jerk of carnage and sin – sometimes I think of that. I wonder if I would have better spent my time drawing birds in the upper branches of cottonwood trees that cling to the shores of the Missouri. Does the Renaissance and its piquant humanism ever read out of steam?

Do you have in mind a tree that clings to shores of a middle-American river? Is that part of your native taxonomy? I watched a ten-year old lose a toe to a snapping turtle once, in what we thought to be an idyllic swimming hole, in the Big Sioux. It was an angry brown river – too brown for the red blood of the severed toe to graduate to spectacle.

In college I had a friend who used to go into a media library and randomly pick out recordings to copy. I assume some were music, some were advertisement, some were found sound. And part of the process was the unknown of the discovery. What if . . .? seems a good an approximation of a spur to make art’s horse gallop or buck, twirl in circles to get you off its back. Have you ever been thrown into the dust? Ridden a wounded horse?

If art is a thief, isn’t what you give it also stolen from you?

Sarah, now I shall stoop. I like your quiet confidence, the active mis en scene of your art, and its reflective boisterousness . . . . then its chaste but not melancholic poise. I think your art is a kind of innocence found. I wish I lived in big exotic cities and knew people who worked for you assistants, who might gossip about the sparkle of your brilliance and the quiet sophistication underlying your semiotics. That smell of turpentine on a cold-water walk-up, back when it was possible to paint in rooms that were not up to code. The past is a different country.

I am not far from the Spam Museum, it should be said.

Sometimes I want to have access to a gallery to walk through, and a person to walk through it with, from whom astounding insight and delight will unspool. To know the context, I suppose, is more than half the battle. And when it seems like maybe the future has the upper hand – that the years that have not landed will trounce the present or wash it clean, like a frenzied squall – the next thought rejects its alibi. That forever deferring function, flinging us out into the sweep of the future’s scythe, is the opposite of the kind of observer’s intimacy I want to occasion in writing you.

Faith is the substance of . . . it escapes me.

All I can say is that I got this way be being this way. What is your story?