Before it was so instantaneous
I'd sit here, this exacting chair,
pen in hand, launching an expedition to you, an undertaking

I'd invest in at stately intervals: the mail
took awhile & that may have been its charm: you never knew
if an answer would come or when or what but how

was not negotiable: in the form
of a thing one could hold in the hand, with weft & pith,
a lineny non-deletable, to be stored away, maybe, depending,

in some actual drawer.
And it wasn't just the slow of those days, but the welling up,
& not at will; the final peak of spill—

less explosion than some place sought & reached
by climbing & climbing; & Time was required—
Grand Canyons of it

in which nothing much was done (naked eye):
how we used to be filled
with eternity