The Couch

Several months ago I acquired a couch. My friends call it my day bed. I call it my writing desk.

The first prose poem I wrote after getting the couch was a description of a high Siskiyou cabin so buried by snow that not even the deer passed by. A friend asked, "How did you get there?" I replied that I had read some mountain poems by Chinese poets, and then I took a nap on my couch.

A good couch takes one on vivid journeys through the imagination, trekking over mountains, along rivers, across deserts. A good couch increases a writer's literary output.

Local Indians call the time of myths "dreamtime" ... and for a very good reason.