The proliferation of generative AI only makes writing more valuable, more beautiful, more worth the time. And it only makes me love it more.

My first allegiance is to poetry; if I love anything else it's the poetry of it I love

Flowers are the right size for imagining. I never loved Iowa more than that one week at the end of July, traipsing through hilly northeastern prairies, oil of mountain mint on the knees of all my field pants, sprigs of mountain mint in all my field shirt pockets, plastic clipboard under my left arm as I tallied the bees and wrote down the names of the plants they landed on—mostly bergamot, or bee balm, which I abbreviated as "BB". One morning we got rained out in the middle of a survey. We waited it out in the government truck and didn't see another bee for the rest of the day. I wondered where they went in the rain, if they weren't close to their nests; K, my boss for the week, didn't know either. This was the scale of our imagining: small, but big enough. The implications of my work were beautiful and clear. A few months later I took a botany class because I thought it would give me the same feeling—freedom from language, primarily. It didn't, but I liked sitting in the old lab for an hour or two several times a week, in the middle of beakers of aquatic ferns and tightly-packed drawers full of sixty-year-old prepared slides from Wisconsin. I liked imagining the textures of a life comprised of one more wildly-particular variety of close attention. A life that would most likely be available to me if I were to choose it continually for a few years, or to return to it occasionally for a decade or two, but not my first or only life. A life I could walk away from without losing anything real. One time after class my professor told me that after thirty-something years in Iowa he'd never "warmed up to" the prairie. I thought of our shared points of reference as children of the northeastern forests, a few decades and a few hundred miles apart. Sphagnum mosses, foliose lichens, teaberries, red efts. It comforted me that the landscape had stayed with him across all the years. Home is like that. A few minutes later I thought—but his children are from Iowa.