ボケット: Boketto
(letters to a wife, found in a box)
"He knew nothing to do but inhabit the paradoxes."--William McIlvanney
Letter 1
Dear Love,
木心
To you, even in winter, full-bellied,
I wobble and space my hope toward home.
To rhyme the darkness with ringing:
bead against wrist, tooth against tongue
and the boom of your heart click, swaying.
Words, like small billows under hull, tiller the jib of my meandering thoughts. Pictures, like wisps of exhalation, rudder the carriage of my body’s hinting. I have always worked both, rhyme and flap, to set my life’s navigation right—Ballast of Boom and Keel—the steerage from which I have tried to helm my way home. A halyard in its pulling.
How does one see through the clouded time of unseeing, especially when they themselves tell stories with pictures while all along they have struggled with the nature of how to see. So, it is me.
I am blind,
You as the moonlight on the water, the hair of a lovers' slumbering hair across my chest in the cool and rounded belly of the night....
pieta and the thinness of our wire souls
Night was meant for us: food, sex, dreams, poetry, cats screaming, tears, loss, hope, food, your brain's songs and the waiting for the sun to tickle up in the morning. Did you father fear this when I entered your life?
Did he worry the lines under my eyes, the twined scars across my chest: for those that dare the light and bending of their neck, risk loss but are rewarded by winged love:
the sky which towers over stone and bronze and wood and our hearts.
the heroic veins on your legs, a remarkable, entangled forest....and all that age, old age, lost upon your young skin....eruption and ignition and starburst.....winging.
Love,
b
