… you can believe in,” a friend writes in a letter. It’s slipped in a card along with poems in an envelope carried all day. I re-open the letter in bed, past midnight—like peeling and sectioning an orange in a crowded bus—and reread with the focus of, well, if not prayer than all I know about caring and attention. “I just want you to know,” she writes and “PLEASE KNOW” and then “Will you?” You don’t have to get a poem. Or even care to, only willing to meet it halfway in the dark. It’s the kind of openness a poem requires: risking touch with a stranger whose voice speaks in the dark, an old friend writing over telegraph wires to speak out love, praying you’re still there. I fold up the letter with the poems and set them in their nest. “I can only imagine” and “if I could pray…” And “a wish.” For now, this all I need to return to the supplication of sleep.