dancing friend

Written by Cathoel Jorss, published 10 years ago

I can’t stop crying. A friend of mine, a musician from Berlin, just wrote to say, do I just use your online postage calculator to pay for a poetry book? I’d like to pre-order. The books themselves are sitting tidily by me as I write, in four perfect cartons, we picked them up a few hours ago from the specialist binder who opened one volume to riffle through, saying, “This paper! It’s lovely, it was lovely to bind.” I am rather surprised how many poems have found their way into the collection, it is a lovely square-edged, strong-shouldered, upright beautiful book containing all the good work I have done in verse form since round about Y2K – when the world was intact, computers were optional: way back then. My friend wrote, I have been reading your story about how the printing got done. He said he liked it, “just as I immensely appreciate every post you make.” I hadn’t realised he was reading me, it feels like a sweet subtle connecting of our souls over all the cold lonely dark miles of sea and air. He wrote, “Time to pay back – literally.” Then my partner, another Berliner, gasped from the other room. He was fixing something on the site he built for me: this one. I ran in to see. My friend had bought every book I’ve ever published plus a download of my album. He bought the lot. He paid about forty-five dollars in postage. I sat down and put my hands over my face and cried and cried. After a few minutes my lover came closer and touched my hair tenderly. “Are you sad?” he wanted to know. “Oder freust du dich, or are you rejoicing?” I nodded, could not speak. “All die Jahre der Dürre,” he said, gently: all the years of drought.