Sometimes I wake up with lines of poetry in my head that are streaming across the bridge from sleep into wakefulness. That’s probably more than you want to know about the inside of my head. But one recent morning a budding poem began, “After my father died, a decade beyond my mother’s death ...”

Just like a dream we might wake up with, lines to a new poem can easily evaporate into thin air like a bubble pops wherever it lands. I am going to get to the point of all this, really I am, so please be patient.

The next line streaming from out of the dissipating night was only half-formed and it was about how it feels to be in the world without either parent even decades after they have disappeared into death. But then the night brain fell silent and the morning brain was not churning yet, so........

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