We were not old when the conversations began. We shared much—the midwestern locale and midwestern sensibilities, love of motorcycles; acquaintanceship with Kenyon College in Ohio; mutual reasons for remembering Red Cloud, Colorado; a fondness for words, yours like a tornado, fast and sure, mine painfully considered; a touch of the confessional in the back and forth messages, workplace desires revealed, cigarette-secrets from the break-room . . . In other words, we had a history. As friends often do, we drifted apart, lost the thread, the connections, who knows why? Still, a friend is a friend, then and always. "Always" has taken on a new meaning. Maybe it's time to revisit those older poems, the Monet poems I called them, haystacks—you had a way of hitting the same themes from every conceivable angle, each a variation on the theme. Your poems did resemble a tornado, tapering with each line, a whirlwind of words and ideas quickly sketched, meant to be read quickly and understood as a whole, not in bits and pieces. You wrote of your world, a world I understood very well, could well imagine the high bluff overlooking the river; the summer heat, the winter cold; could well imagine the stretch of empty highway, pushing the Laverda to its limit, then a little more—those were the connections. More recently, you wrote of the wide-world, coming to your political poems, your impressions of an imperfect world dominated by imperfect men, always the men. But I will remember the early poems, the haystack poems, the colors and textures, and think of you, and miss you, and thank you for being a friend when we were younger, when we spoke of commonalities and expectations, as friends do.