Love Letter 58
6,212 Myriad Parasangs In The Owl’s Nest You’ve Become
East to west, I run around the yard. I swear I saw you floating
out where planes are circling the fog, the noiseless throbbing magnet’s
ceaseless summons breaking through my dreams, my cell phone strangely singing
worship hymns to pocketed machines, so that the only stagnant
being is you. The owls riddle into bloom, bursting flagrant
wingspans groomed for love and prey-bent.
Circle me a yes on the note tacked to willow bark. I wrote it crying
wind all through me like a Wiffle bat, and crackly leaves in latent
branches summoning spring with painful sighs, and I’ve forgotten something
owlish in your eyes that spins in place, a liquid through the mason
jar, a scarlet glow uniting beet and beet, an empty swing set
where your knees jack high and day-bent.
Rain on my magic capsule-heart, a foamy neon toy expanding
clumsily with spokes becoming music parts, which further hastened
into cosmic organs, pipes entwined as space-time’s web, booming
thunder claps. I cannot hold you. Why should muskrats in adjacent
tunnels nose each other’s fur, yet time’s barbwire fences
keep our atoms trapped and dirt-bent?
Once upon a river we drank from diamonds, and happily then sorting
them like the aurora borealis, shattered into bits. A tent
staked into your eyes has stood all night, with silhouettes cavorting
on the trembling vinyl walls as bears that, baring teeth, ascend
fur and all into the thickets overhead, where sometimes vagrant
coons conspire, starved and trash-bent.
Cottonwoods are gossiping again, and with your name send streaming
cloudy puffs of seedlings while I spin in place. I smell your scent,
rich as a mesquite, and someone tabulating snapping tree limbs
bleaches clean the sky reflected in your eyes. It’s not the end
Moses saw retreat on Sinai when his god’s face gouged the plaited
hair of priests on fire and snake-bent.
What’s the point of living mean and drunk inside a corn husk, spitting
phtew on every deking flea that isn’t you? That dawn’s effacement
leaves no place for little roses dried and locked in jars. Sifting
grain, so much of you crammed down to rushing plinks that mist a cadence,
I deal in dust. Repeatedly I flip the Fool and shout, “Dear hatchling,
come at me like a pulsar, ray-bent.”
