At twenty she came to me
Saying: you will write books
And some people will read them
But you’ll not be happy
Life will become
A muffled clamor
You’ll be foreign
To yourself
Like a man
Who speaks
The glaucous dialects
Of herdsmen
And all I could hear
Was “books”
Authorship—
Not understanding
The loneliness
To come
And the crying out
For trees
To rescue me
Soothsayer
