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 2
Dear Light,
The rare light umbrellas storm-ward and catches both wind and the swarming that ignites from the seasonal change, the gnats that scatter from the grass like poppy-seed or black-winter salt thrown over ice crisp and alight with sound in the diminutive luster, the bees that hone upward, chasing the crevasses and dents of a cloud’s face, incandescent as phosphorous mountaining up an altitudinal giant, the dew ascending from the cupping of late-afternoon warmth and the frequencies of language and sound gone awry in this late September timbre. All this enchantment and all the eruption which recall the distance from where I sit among the change of thought and temperature, scampering toward that which is you. Becoming. Sift these words like husk and the fingers in one another’s mouth.
I stare horizon-long and look for you in the late summer ascension, the barn swallows arabesque in the dimming light nuanced by weight and the memory of cinnamon (not spice but carriage and absent poundage), the winging of the early-jetting bats whose youth is feverish and eager and the flapping of bird and mammal which I glove and toss distant from this drying land toward the watery spaces from which you speak to me from afar. Later, the cars’ headlights at speak of desire and loss in their carving of speed or spinning, for you are not here to skirt them in the lit-up walk home and the shadows that remind us of other certainties. At night, you tired your stories against my chest like darned socks balled. In the morning we exchanged dream-tales like recipes for the awakening.
Writing a letter in absence of your presence, I distance the miles in an alphabet of phonemes and clutter. Love as sound. Meaning as the negotiation of pattern: the streetlamp under which you picked the insect bite at your knee, the wisp of a strand or two of your hair that fell like dandelion stuck from breath on the upper lip and forefinger. The stone that you found, suddenly, in your pocket like a forgotten receipt. The box opened in the old woman’s shop that carved out juniper and allspice. The algebra of desire and the dissipating light.
Distance pulling, the pulse at run and of you.
We scatter ourselves, though the distance fans like prints in muddy sand, and declare the spaces and the pace of us, elongated and holy.
My love, I am leaving:
I am leaving, so remember the tattoos that line the curves of my body as the light carving against my bones and your hips locked into place and sound:
ink chiseled into a temple wall across the sea.
And thus, please
take the stars into your mouth and count them at night:
they will speak my name.
your, only your,
Husband
