I want to be excused, at least this once, from being me, and be instead someone who sees daily things as miracles, and falls into a dream of being a great green river rolling over dams, under the bridges of cities, neither believing nor disbelieving, not searching or keeping, always yet never the same thing, flowing. I want a moment of silence for the girl I secretly loved in high school, whose suicide note was just a dog-eared J. Crew summer catalog. She wrote poems with a leaky Bic pen, skipped school to read books in the fruit-filled woods along the river. I want as my final image, please — her tapering fingers, blackened by ink, plucking those wild persimmons.