I’d been trying for months to write a poem about Crawdad, a boy my father knew in high school    Crawdad had no friends    he came to school with mud in his hair    smelling like his nickname    and the blood of the deer he’d hunted    in their redwood-dappled dawn    it just seemed to me this guy embodied something    the lost art of living wildly    plain otherness      these ideas got boring    one day I looked up “Crawdad” + the name of my father’s town      where it turns out the guy’s been contributing articles about his life to the local newspaper     eg. his stint as a professional mushroom-picker    which put him in contact with itinerant degenerates, fungal in nature and capitalistic to a fault    in another post he considers the flaw of narrative, in presuming a story begins or ends    he writes only the mud seems permanent, just kind of sitting out there    I was like whoa    I was like can this be the same....?    it was momentarily upsetting    like ordering a pipe in the mail and receiving a picture of a pipe      people are never who I decided they were    they are like piles of snow     brief, mutable    yes, I thought I felt sorrow    it was not sorrow    it was the awful pleasure of watching a person jump irreparably out of his own beginning, trout-like