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A Letter Beginning With Paleolithic
Dear ________, Paleolithic, tangible, and thriving: this
Warrior’s still not stilled, still nibbling cold scones late nights
With yellow light throwing the chair back’s medallion into astonishing
relief.
It pictures, albeit partially, a unicorn with a turtle dove
In an erstwhile mild clench “standarding” the horn.
Is brazenly picturesque, humbles the sitter, who is never there.
Yes, lonesomeness, thy name is gazzera, the chatterer, my magpie.
I scan the morning gazette, purposefully amuck with the novelty of things:
Everything new, nothing new. Art is always so stingy with art!
A mere gloss becomes a new excursion, a random in a new woodlot.
On a rock sixteen kilometres shy of Puigcerda a praying mantis rests,
Disturbingly green. Somewhere a frontier craves a detailing
Of its proper flora: horsetails and sweet fern, jack
Pines and hemlock, aspens spending it all in a freshet.
Oh the niceties of, howbeit, factual strolls make me turgid and blissful!
Like this: isn’t oboe—fat word—the bastard
of the French
Hautbois or high wood? Consider the hierarchy of wine
bottles, the three-
Litre’d and bigger: jeroboam, rehoboam, mathusalem, salmanazar!
Gosh, ________, isn’t th’imagination a lovely whore?
So receptive, undeterred, never pinned down for long?
Or colder, trance-like, like a jetty hampering the petty intrusions?
Don’t the reluctant, so spurned, turn into themselves, curling like
wood shavings?
They are waves. And casually noted. They are eidola.
Or is it that my quietness is a bay, contains diffidence, slack
Water, algae’d and a turn wistful where it blurs to the barrier?
________, I don’t know. I “eschew” knowing and the night
Goes sloppy and my odalisque is propped up
On one elbow, lazily eager, or tentative, turning her ankle, regaling
The light, the confident light. She is right. She is the room
That utters belonging, the sofa’s blue reiterated, not quelled
By the sky patches, impulsive in the teeming tapestry. And ________,
Tonight I team with you, redeemed by factual words,
“Reduced” “to” “these.” “Ceux-ci,”
“these.” Love, John
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A Letter Beginning With The Unsung
Dear ________, The unsung hero as Restoration drama?
I disagree,
And heartily. That animal must bathe at dusk—I never sees it.
No I don’ts. I druther tell of plain songs: th’intersticial
Stitching of voice—triplum, duplum, tenor! Or of how
The wood of the chestnut tree repels spiders, is used for attics.
Mais non? Mais si. That’s sixteenth century, that’s
factual,
Memorial, and unforgiving. Screw that. As Sir Philip Sidney
Scribed: tonight we’re “peyzing each sillable.” So if
I say
Small winds suffer a cup to keep a cool rigidity, aren’t
I lost
Betwixt irony and honor, daring the zero meridian,
In the throes of a zone neither middling nor peripheral, neither
Occidental nor oriental. Orienteering, pshaw. I’m lost too.
Years back I shook so my compass flew out of my hand with nary
A word, lodged itself in a glumly mute snowbank. True north.
The south was everywhere and everywhere was calling. Yoohoo
Stretching out like a grace note. ________, I’m drinking,
A wee much. And wisht oh wisht oh you be being here.
My nether notebook, my tumult, my comrade.
Knowst thou the story of Red? Puigcerda Red?
The woman I loved for such a small bedlam
Entraining to Barcelona with an unsung army of youth?
She passed me olives across the aisle: a smile and a smile,
Impossibly even, gentle and quick. The glow and the pause
And the debarking: adiós and adiós.
________, My glance doth stray, doth sweep the landscape like a follow-
Through: some uneven tidbits of rock outcropping, a road affirmed
By some buildings. Or it doth lurch to movement:
There’s a cat judging the width of a barely open door with its whiskers,
Nonplussed by obstacle and desire, needling to dart through,
Calming and calming. I need the artist’s little square shield, a
frame
To discern a formal arrangement amidst the clutter of, say, a mantle,
Where books vying with books assert, and so asserting, become
A little vague and humble before the thing. Like the way
I can so tremblingly ease this sign pencil up against what is
clutched
In my hand and is writing its word, and so predicate, so become
This man, this noun. It is a useful and limitless wedge,
Queerly possessing. ________, Red is lost, forever lost.
So go, hero, and read your goddamn Restoration play.
And just don’t you never believe it. Love, John
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