I remember hearing certain people thought flowers were obscene. That floral displays were essentially pornography, with uncovered carpel and stamen, reproductive organs for all to see, spread open, luring us in with vivid displays of botanical sexuality.

Words wash up on the shore of your brain. Less and less tied to the world where the rest of us live. It is fitting that you – a poet to the last – speak in koans.

Scores of Manhattanites were fleeing to the suburbs, desperate to escape the city’s descent into financial and moral decrepitude. The general feeling was that the city had passed its heyday and was, like Rome and Philadelphia before it, about to fall. War, plague and a scourge of porno shops would soon consume the land. Such dire predictions, however, didn’t stop hordes of young career aspirants, like myself, from swarming into the city every day, our suitcases packed with little experience and outsized ambitions.

It was then that I realized that though I’d never dance for a living… I would always be a Dancer.

Weren’t we supposed to hear only birds chirping and grass growing? It turns out that power mowers and leaf blowers give jackhammers and car alarms a run for their money, especially leaf blowers with their incessant roaring.

Somehow, despite punishing poverty, they gave their hard-earned shekels, rubles, zloty (Polish $$$) to a traveling photographer to take their picture. Why did they feel the need to have their picture taken?

Des Moines is just a few degrees west of perfect south from Minneapolis – two-hundred thirty-four flat miles of corn, milo, wheat, beans, cabbage, spinach, and the occasional tall hemp plant which, if you smoked it you got a headache.

We remember how we forgot to hurt when we danced in stiletto pumps. What we wish for now is another walk through Paris, another climb up the steep hills of Montmartre.

504 North Beverly Glen: where I spent seven of the happiest years of my life. When we moved there in 1952,