It's Sunday and the children are a'bed. Last night, a good friend of ours (and a colleague of Martin's), wonderful poet and wise fellow Bob Randolph (his wife, Amy, is also a lovely poet and songwriter with whom we have sung many a time), sent us this e-mail after we potlucked with some good friends on Saturday evening. . .Thought I'd share it with you.

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Hi Martin and Kim,

Amy told me that at Noah's house the other night, when Amy was there, Martin told about writing a poem and reading it to Kim as she stood working with something on the stove, her back to him. He said he finished reading and there was no response, so he asked what she thought of it. She turned around with tears in her eyes because the poem was beautiful.

Amy said that at that point, when she heard Martin recount that, she said to herself, "Ah, yes--they'll be ok."

I agree and want to amplify that a little. Tenure or no tenure, as important as that may be, is not the core, neither is promotion or not promotion, and where a person works or doesn't work isn't the core either--Stevens sold insurance, Ginsberg got kicked out of college, Snyder sailed around all over as a merchant seaman--writers write; to a writer what can matter more than writing something so beautiful it brings tears to your soul-mate. That's what we do. That's what we build our universes out of. The rest is stuff, but that's the heart of it.

So I'm with Amy on this.
The two of you standing by that stove may not be much to some people, but to me, Martin, it's exactly why you should be hired at Harvard, or anywhere else.

(At least, that's the sort of thing the universe I bank on comes from.)

In the midst of talk of . . ., talk of abiding sorrow, a man reads a poem to his wife in the kitchen as she is cooking, and the poem is so beautiful it makes her cry. That's the diamond and the truth.

Bob