Letter from Austin

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perfection

Letter from Austin

Michael, when you say moons do you see
cold stone floating in the firmament
or phrases frayed in the mouth and spat on paper?
And does the Spanish moon simmer at a similar
pace to mine or yours? Which embers blush brighter?
But let’s turn to estuaries, to salt and clamor and gun-
running poets and interrupted words sold in stalls
between parenthetical gates, to incomparable cavas
and the deterioration of envy and intervening years.
Or perhaps mislaid passion – a friend claims love
is merely a bad rash, that we scratch and scratch
and inflame but never truly cure what ails us. Sounds like
politics to me. Or sports. And business. Or neighborhoods.
On my street people should cook and play music together,
laugh, raise chickens and read good books. They should
brew beer, swap tomatoes, recite each other’s poetry and sing
in tune. But we’re different here, preferring instead electronics
glowing in dimly lighted rooms. I reject this failure, as I also
reject the theory of centrifugal force spinning off the moon’s
body from the earth’s crust, preferring to imagine a giant
impact blasting matter into orbit around what morphed into the
earth, and somehow accreting the stuff into this orb we
sometimes worship. This, to me, is how good relationships
form: explosions of thought and emotion followed by periods
of accretion. But what I mean is I hope this finds you well
by the river of holy sacrament. Remember: brackish water
bisects our worlds. Turn. Filter. Embrace. Gotta run. Bob.

Originally published in Heron Clan 3, this first appeared on the blog in July 2015.

My friend Michael occasionally sends hand-written notes or letters to me, and I respond with poems. This is one. You might read some of his writing at Underfoot Poetry.

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25 thoughts on “Letter from Austin”

  4. Too bad we all don’t communicate like this in letters to each other as the main form of note-leaving, or medium/long range communication. And, imagine what society would be like if each and every neighborhood household raised varieties of chickens (especially some black or white Silkies)? As always I dream of a Utopia where nature and steel love each other.

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    • I enjoy writing “letter poems,” but they generally take so long to form that they can’t be used for ordinary communication. But I must admit that years ago my wife and I used haiku (terrible haiku – on Wednesdays only) to communicate to each other from our respective jobs. The results were hilarious…

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  6. There is some really profound image/word manipulation going on here. I can see why you include it as part of your catalogue.

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