From Dick Louries' Anima (1977)

"Thinking of You"

about one month before my thirty-third 

birthday I finally decided I

have to write poems more often than every

six weeks     that goes for you too     you know you'll

have to decide sometime     do it now     it

may be too late at the edge of thirty-three

for me it's almost winter before I

make up my mind     the sun setting at half-past

four by now     and to go out even in the

day I need a coat     please listen      do it

even if it's ony rain as you cross

the mountain     or being scared by the sight

of the president's face at a news conference

or quarrels with your lover     do it      poems

more often      even if it's only that you 

come around a turn onto the plain and see

New Paltz in the distance like phony Camelot

and the pumkins dead in the roadside fields

Some english teacher or another of mine in high school told me that the poem "This is just to say," you know, the one about the plums, was the greatest love poem ever written. I didn't get it then, I though she was cracked (and this is not to say I've changed my opinion about that) but I started thinking about it sometime towards the end of the semester last spring. I thought it was written by cummings, so I checked out a few collections of his poems, and read them over the summer, looking for inspiration, and maybe even few snippets to plagiarize, for a love letter i'd been promising about a love that I felt had long since lost its poem inspiring qualities. Any fool could have told me that the poem is actually by William Carlos Williams (I don't know why I didn't just google it straight off anyway).

I've since lost one of the e.e. cummings books and I still don't get the big deal about the damn, cold plums.

Do I fess up and pay the lost book fine? Or renew it online, every six weeks . . . for the rest of my life?