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 5
Dear World-within-World
To write you is to love you. To love you is to reimagine distance not as measurable loss but as calm. Does the milkweed pod consider the journey before it bends toward collapse and rivering divestment? To write a letter in the 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 street lamp 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.
Instead of words, let me finger the mechanics of weather, pick apart Winter's expectant thaw as the bump and grind of joinery, the scent of which I anticipate when opening an aged box in Kensington Market, the pictures and lace and thumbprints that were missing, but the dark square emitted, jasmine and cotton week and string jasmine. Is not the sweep of the world's radius amplitude of scent and syllable: allspice, juniper, mugword, and marjoram leave, moth-eaten and calculable by you?
As I stretch to finish this letter, a burning slowly fills the room, not fire or smoke or repulsion but settlement. For it makes sense that the final words speak of a different form, palimpsest and ghost walk. As I finish the last line, I shall bend the letter into a kind of origami, or slightly weathered towel. As fold this note, I shall recall the way you upheld and twirled your hair after shampooing, more softening than the permutations of neatness. And once words are bent and the paper small enough to fit in my palm, I shall set it on fire with the matches we found on the table that was not our own. After the paper takes a liking to the heat, I shall drop into the blue rice bowl you said reminded you of your grandmother, veiny and stained by rain and let the words smoke signal any last syllable that I have forgotten. And after the paper is birdlime, the color of the mountain night and after the words are parted like pinecone dropped on that woody path along Hualien's cliffs, and when the amber embers have cobbed, I shall take each piece, like cut-sections of pineapple brazed, and place them in my mouth. And I will not chew but swallow, wafer and water and kohl, until the letters and thoughts are absorbed in my body and the language will synch will by chemistry and digestion, residing in the space inside my organs and blood and breath oxygenated by hormone, elixir and process. All of this in anticipation when we are together and for the inevitable parting when I die so that my body's disintegration will be furtherance and living rather than dissipation. The dandelions and the reeds and the high-mountain tea shall flourish from the words as my body slips its way back into the soil and sand and root and the words slip out as nutrient and lace. That is the nourishment your love and your patience has provided. Bountiful and breedy.
From thirst and the meal that you once gave, all of that fecund balming will delta out: love and language and tissue. In that burning of paper and the swallowing of language, the earth will union has we have and this infirm body shall stir and spread soil-ward with both the breaking-down of my biology into another embryology and the soil upon which these words first made sense not lost to oblivion but burnished into a reconstruction.
Take that soil and plan anew my love for one day when we are forgotten that nourishment and picked-apart papyrus will one day shelter another couple and another and another under which the shadow of the tree grown from that divesture will cool during the summer humidity and hubris and though they shall not know our names nor our love, they shall know shade, the sheltering under the cavernous sky from which danger and diminution mark out against relief. And so I strike the match and as the ignition sings like a wasp passing, here come the lilacs and the conifers and that entire wait. But that is still generationally ahead and I am calm.
All that contained in the purview as I await you and turn briefly toward the land as we scatter ourselves, though the distance fans like prints in muddy sand, it awakes and muscles and fragments. Can you hear that and the spittle of the kiss when wood meets phosphorous and carbon, radiant and kindling?
I scrap and scraggle these picture-words in honour of our life,
Your light everywhere this morning:
May they honour your luminous presence the way the September clouds, carriers of clarity and refined light,
Honor the lost and forgotten, heaven’s uncrumpling.
So breathe and bide my wife through the waiting and recall the moments written by both
long past the shadow and the ash, the chestnut and the laurel,
and declare the spaces and the pace of us elongated
and holy.
There you are
scent of this life,
root and wing of these garden moments, this cumulus titling, razing the darkness from my life
and your, yet
the sea still beckons, unarranged, ungone.
Love, not ever, not for a moment my dear, gone ever
for there, the
Rhyme of existence, even amid the grief
tumbling.
your,
Lemur
