Dear Jesse, as the moon lingers a moment over the bitterroots, before its descent into the invisible, my mind is filled with song. I find I am humming softly; not to the music, but something else; some place else; a place remembered; a field of grass where no one seemed to have been; except a deer; and the memory is strengthened by the feeling of you, dancing in my awkward arms. For it is true we can seldom help those closest to us. Either we don't know what part of ourselves to give or, more often than not, the part we have to give is not wanted. And so it those we live with and should know who elude us. But we can still love them - we can love completely without complete understanding. As time passed, my father struggled for more to hold on to, asking me again and again: had I told him everything. And finally I said to him, 'maybe all I know about Paul is that he was a fine fisherman.' 'You know more than that,' my father said; 'he was beautiful.' And that was the last time we spoke of my brother's death. My brother stood before us, not on a bank of the Big Blackfoot River...but suspended above the earth...free from all its laws, like a work of art. And I knew just as surely, just as clearly, that life is not a work of art, and that the moment could not last. - Like many fly fishermen in western Montana where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise. Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of those rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.