blueprints

78 | robert hass
I Got the Blues by Gerald Allen, age 13.
A sixteen-year-old from at Atlanta might be thinking about a poem in
which she describes the architecture of fish to a young architect. She might
call it “Letter to an Architect.” 3 It would arrive in the office of River of
Words typed neatly—one of thousands of poems that come into the office
every spring. And one of the poets who are screening the poems might
interrupt the others to read the beginning of this poem out loud because of
its young author’s breathtaking poise.
Not even you could keep me from
mentioning the fish, their beauty of