A Faithful Account of Where I Live: The Letters of Cid Corman and William Bronk

17 Jan[uary] 69

Dear Cid,

[. . . .]

I envy you your Camellias. No, there is nothing here in winter. Since Christmas it has been near zero one way or another at night, rising most days into the twenties and this year though not every year there is deep snow on the ground. But I have a room with glass to the east and south. Christmas cactus and begonia and African violets flower through the winter and I have an hibiscus in a tub with ruffled red flowers, a philodendron dubium to the ceiling and a jade tree I have kept for twenty years or more. Nice for Sunday mornings. I love my house and abuse it for its demands on me, the way it holds me.

I wake early in the morning and hungry so I eat a substantial breakfast. So I am as likely to think as much about dying then as any time. I think of it almost all the time. We are wakers, but wakers who sleep, sleepers who die. How else should we live? But what an odd thing we should have this kind of choice that we should ask how should we live, should not know at all what we have to do what we ought to do what we mean to do and no one to tell us even after we do it. Were we wrong? No way to know. We stumble around. Can't even be wrong.

Jim Weil sent me the dummy of The Empty Hands this week.

Love

Bill