Unsent Letters

pour la photographe

[Lunaria]

Do you have your glasses on; do they touch your face and leave
a faint mark, self-portrait as tender as toothbites on the wrist
of someone with whom you only intended to say goodbye?
Does the light glancing off them move towards or away?

[Dracaena]

With the insistence of palm fronds,
I am a smooth, flat, pliant thing, wound up
to such an extent of tension, to such a hard point
that my mind is neither giving nor receiving, neither
space nor substance.      My mind is a mould for a tool.

[Palmata]

Some of this dulse bears calciferous patterns, like stone honeycombs; others, neon green nipples, indiscernibly floral or faunal. I lose myself consuming long tatters; I knit them through my teeth and down the gullet, warts and all, wondering how such things let me live off them, as you do — simple, necessary, and redemptive even of the general ambivalence of life.

[Thuja]

The air of forests in the north
is always cold as heavy cloth

laid over the clay of one's own
heart in the cautious studio of time,

to gauge the capacity of the animal
you will become once kilned into

hard imperviousness, then forced
to utter human words that crack

the mask of all your wilderness
into pocketable pieces of lore.