Had he given me just one, or half a dozen from his cache, poems to read and check, and make suggestions on, I’d judge each one by look and feel, like buying fruit from unknown trees. But after holding, feeling forty, I sense a tree with grafted limbs. The fruit grow each unique, but carry something from the whole. I almost see the trunk and branches, how they spread and where they aim, their bent and pretty form. My tone is altered by such poems. In seeing things unseen by him, I see them partly through his eyes.