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said, Ed Poe? And he said, Mm-hm. And then he peered closely at me. He said, Paul? Paul Chowder? And I said, Yes, Ed! How are you doing? Been a long time. He nodded. I said, I see you're folding some underpants there.
    He said, Yes, I am. Doing my laundry. You?
    I said I'm doing my laundry, too. And I mean, if you're going to do your laundry, this place is probably as good as or better than any place I can think of. Marseilles, France. Or "Fronce," as we say.
    And I said, Can I venture to ask how the poetry's going?
    He said, It's going pretty well, pretty well. I wrote a poem, and I got paid for it, and it was in the newspaper.
    And I said, That's fantastic. What's it called?
    And he said, It's called "The Raven."
    I said, Holy shit, Ed, "The Raven." Great title. What's it about?
    And he said, It's about a man who has a visit from a raven.
    And I said, That sounds really promising. What does the raven stand for? Death and fate and horror and government wiretapping and stuff like that? And he just looked at me. He wasn't about to explicate his poem for me. Which I understand. And I said, Well, listen, take care. I grabbed my bag of laundry. I said, It's been great seeing you. Stay happy. And he said, You too, it's good seeing you. We waved again. Take care, bye-bye. Watch out for the big swinging blade. And I walked out the door of the laundromat. Off down the street. And that was the time that I ran into Edgar Allan Poe.
    G OD I WISH I was a canoe. Either that or some kind of tree tumor that could be made into a zebra bowl but isn't because I'm still on the tree.
    It's late in the afternoon, and the bats are getting ready to go flying for bugs. Leigh Hunt has a poem about how this girl, Jenny, jumped from her chair and kissed him. I'm thinking of how difficult it is to look old poets in the eye. Their eyelids, which droop and have skin tags on them, like tiny pennants age has hoisted, fill me with a strange consternation. And I know that the old poets themselves are self-conscious--they're worried that people will see these two blinky pink openings in their face and think, Ugh, those look like flesh wounds with eyeballs tossed loosely into them.
    I know that when my eyes get old and skin-taggy I'm going to be very happy to have glasses to hide behind.
    Even now I have trouble looking people in the eye. You're supposed to "meet people's eyes." Meet them how? They have two eyes. You have to choose one. I start by looking at the person's right eye, intently, and then I begin to feel that I'm hurting the feelings of the person's left eye. As she's telling her story, she thinks, Why is he concentrating his attentions so fixedly on my right eye? Is he deliberately looking away from my left eye? Is there something wrong with my left eye? So then I shift over, and I stare into her left eye, till it's as if I'm falling down an optical pipe.
    My eyes have to skip away, eventually. And when I'm asked a question I look out the window. People assume that I'm failing some kind of test of candor when I'm just not an eye-meeter, that's all. I'm just not going to meet your eye for any extended period. Period.
    H OW ARE THOSE POETRY exercises coming? Did you do that thing I mentioned where you write down every real story somebody tells you or that you overhear in a twenty-four-hour period? Did I mention that exercise? Maybe not. I don't mean the stories that come to you on electric screens or through car loudspeakers but the ones from right around you. I overheard a story at the bank yesterday about a car-repair place that overcharged. And then somebody told me a story about a dog who ate a sock. The vet couldn't "shift it," so he removed the sock surgically and now the dog is doing well. And there were other stories, too. If you listen to them, the stories and fragments of stories you hear can sometimes slide right into your poem and twirl around in it. Then later you cut out the story and the poem has a mysterious feeling of charged