It's hardly ten and my eyelids are already wilting. My sleep is so sporadic that I don't even look at the clock anymore before turning off my lamp. The only difference in hours is the way the light pushes in, muted by the blinds. It drips in over the sill and spills on my bookshelf, on letters scattered on the floor, on laundry and junkmail and stray strands of my hair or clusters of dust. There are hours between late and morning that are neither -- gray, quiet things before birds wake, like the sky the morning before it rains, but clearer without the moist whisper of fog.

It's not that I know these hours as intimately as I'd like you to think I do, just that I've come to know them in passing, like the enduring gaze of a child next to you at a traffic light. Like a stranger's smile in passing.

I have been meaning to tell you about White Light White Heat and The Freewheelin', which I bought on vinyl. "Corrine, Corrina" and "Gift." Does anyone know what the image on the front of White Light White Heat is? You can't tell from Amazon, but there's some sort of image in the bottom left that blends with the black.

And I forgot that I meant to give you some Ted Kooser poems. They're some favorites from Braided Creek:

The hay in the loft
misses the night sky,
so the old roof
leaks a few stars. What is it the wind has lost
that she keeps looking for
under each leaf?

Some days
one needs to hide
from possibility.

I want to describe my life in hushed tones
like a TV nature program. Dawn in the north.
His nose stalks the air for newborn coffee.

There are mornings
when everything brims with promise,
even my empty cup.

Everyone thought I’d die
in my twenties, thirties, forties, fifties.
This can’t go on forever.

Straining on the toilet
we learn how
the lightning bug feels.

At my cabin
to write a poem
is to throw an egg across
the narrow river into the trees.

Strange world indeed:
a poet keeping himself awake
to write about insomnia. The moon put her white hands
on my shoulders, looked into my face,
and without a word
sent me on into the night.

The drunken man
spills most of his importance
on his shoes. Raindrops on your glasses;
there you go again,
reading the clouds.

Suddenly my clocks agree.
One has been stopped for several
months, but twice a day
they have this tender moment.

We should
sit like a cat
and wait for the door
to open.

The moon put her hand
over my mouth and told me
to shut up and watch.