My foragings last week returned me to a book and a poet that were essential to me back when I knew even less about everything than I do now: The Magician's Feast Letters by Diane Wakoski. I got to thinking about the poem that concludes the collection: "Why I Am Not a Painter," which I mentioned in Friday's post. Diane graciously gave me permission to republish the poem here. Thanks, Diane. After reading more than a hundred pages of poems about desire, encountering the poem's (and the book's) closing lines sent me right back to the book's opening poem, "Breakfast," and a flurry of thought about youth, beauty, desire, and loss. How differently I read the book now that I'm thirty years away from the intensity of twenty. I certainly enjoy the flash of recognition, the feeling of calm that utterly eluded me then. Click here to read Why I Am Not a Painter.