i.
Can I write about how many times
I have tried to write this letter?
Blank, stupid afternoons
when my mind says, Write it
as though you were speaking to him.
Then the soggy silence settling in my brain.
So I try to respond with things,
sprigs of rosemary tied with twine,
red-shifted photographs of trees at night.
Nothing so beautiful, nothing
at all adequate.


ii.

Wind, before it touches anything,
grass, branch, hand
is absence. No sting felt,
the ruin unmodified.
A stirring of air
like an honesty before it is spoken,
two mouths woven into a kiss
before the lips touch
longing the thread between them--that.
That desire carried through the waking moments
so that it wakes all the moments
between me and the world,
a tap on the shoulder, cold finger
laid carefully on my spine or eyelid.
Or something else, a chasm of beauty
that shocks me back
the sudden, deep sunlight in the city of your hair.


iii.

That I arrived--
the wood sighing and splintering
in my chest, the distance drawn out
between the slender crutch
and the weight it bears--
that I arrived here
to where you, moonlit, were,
the shadowy eyes of an ancestor
enclosed in a shoe box.
That now I must face it
whatever it is
whatever at all that it is.


iv.

Without meaning to, I have reached the point
in the conversation
where I have nothing left
My voice these days like weather reports
reciting, clouds, leaves, rain where what remains
is the love between us
which I am trying to avoid.

So it seems that I have lost
and must begin again.
My mind says, Open with what is true.
Aaron-- the way our lives meet,
fog scratching a window pane,
like wind touching wind.

11/19/2005

Author's Note: I need help with this. A lot of help. Criticism, please.

Posted on 11/19/2005
Copyright © 2025 Marina Dawn