A Genre

I would like to suggest a new specialization of verse. I am speaking of the love letter, a traditionally staid and rather uninteresting form for which I believe I have developed an unusual facility.

Looking through old documents, it's astounding how many of these I've written. Reams. They run the gamut from youthful and embarrassing to poignant and textured. Mostly embarrassing. More than anything else I've written, though, these seem to clearly delineate the evolution of my voice.

There's also a fascination to be had looking at the wreckage of your past. Like poking your tongue into a sore tooth, or rather breaching the stale sanctity of some lost tomb and knowing that it was you who were buried here.

When I bring one of these up from the seafloor I will change the name to Elizabeth and edit out identifying features.

Here goes:

The car stands fixed as Route 322, punctuated by both rain and the Commodore Barry Bridge, solidifies from an arching, gray planetarium. A foreign and tender softness. A gray of plumped moth bodies and the underside of garage doors heavy with age and lousy with unhatched eggsacks. A firmament of gray which undoubtedly marks entrance to the Guf and a return to unspoken places of our most sacred and solemn common memory. This sky is heavy. This sky is pregnant with water and with nostalgia.

I am here and in this car I am racing. I am a body and a mind which is individual. It's an important assertion and one I should make often.

I am cataloging the immediate history of my heart and thereby that of mankind generally. There are decisions to be made. It's been the same decisions each time. The choices made seem brave and deeply felt, but everyone ends up at home disappointed and hungry.

The cycle is starting anew and I am flush with potential. The springtime pantheon - championed by Hope herself - again enthroned on high. My limbs heal; pace quickens; thoughts become whole and deliciously melodious.

There's so much I want to tell you. How your grace and your smile were a beacon - an unfurled spinneret leading out of the labyrinth. How the rhythm of our laughter these past weeks coaxed blood back to a drowned heart and twisted fingers. For a solid moment my vision was unblurred and your walls unmanned and I stood within your kingdom. I knew you.

The lives we lead are stunted and hunchback. The pleasures still found desperate and drunken. Surrounded daily with examples of the worst of love, sick and dysfunctional. Chambered hearts like furious angels sobbing and clawing in ritual lust and ritual abandonment.

The place where we work is a thing of poisons. Its walls may as well be wreathed in gnashing teeth. Its corners choked with fiercest, jagged vines and fragmented bone. It is a temple built to disappointment and futility. We are obedient to the pulse of this hive. In the absence of any other guiding force we are shunted through its piping and waterways to rest when the flow rests and move when it moves. To bump into one another. To mumble the daily litanies and continue hollow, beaten, and unfulfilled.

You are wondering, of course, why I'm telling you these things. This earnest but monstrous tirade which I find in turns sincere and frightening. I've seen you glide about in the periphery of my vision for a very long time with little concern. Graceful movement, haunted expressions, a laughter rare but intoxicating. With your hair up immaculate as a chesspiece and wearing furrows in the floor to follow the same path day in and day out. A white queen on the field. This queen and I, when alone and moved by liquors, are now grand friends. There are tea parties and tinkling laughter; strolls arm in arm on the promenade. Enveloped in night's secrecy and separated from the mad pulse we put our heads together and whisper secrets.

Sorrow clings about your person like a gown. I could smell this from the moment we met. Sense the furrows and rivulets traced in eyes sunken - totally at odds with smiles and speech and gesturing hands. Eyes clouded by broken promises. The eyes of a soul alone. It is this which struck me so deeply, just as it is this which gives me reason to analyze your cruelties.

I sensed at [location] a way out, a hook in the sky. If it turned out true or if it turned out idle fancy I could follow the light and be saved again. I knew that this hook would support my weight even if it was itself supported by nothing. A bit of smoke, a bit of music, and an ardent wishing - all that beauty is ever really birthed from.

Ah, if only you could have known me in years past. I was a thing of fire. My face a tempest of intensity in vision and passionate combat. I did all the wrong things, but dear god how I meant them! In tiny stages of complacency and compromise do great things end. What you know and see of me is a husk. The abandoned summer carapace clinging to an oak branch. An armless statue. A wet letter.

The culminating note I am approaching here is one of thanks. I wish to thank you. You are a reader, and so I must assume that behind closed doors you take words into yourself and you feel them. The day's defenses are relaxed and a more primitive and vulnerable hand turns pages and makes adjustment. In this way, then, do I visit you. Dust and offal has lain upon the belts and driveshafts. Animals took refuge in the rafters and October winds blew dead leaves in lazy spirals about the interior.

No longer. I can hear the purr and whistle as birds take flight rotors test their integrity.

The heart is sometimes shut in a large box, locked, and buried in the earth. Such things are imagined to be for safety, but are in truth merely acts of demented sacrifice to that very earth.

A lazy heart surrounded by a flock of cats; a desperation of cats. To stay in rooms with some kind of shepherd. Crook driven through the reverse and emerging somewhere near the navel. Not an ear to receive a tenth of your thoughts and dreams if you'd even share them.

Make no mistake, this is not something I am asking of you. It is something you have already done. I am reminded of what it is to have your chest tighten at the sight of a face. Why men build and birds sing. Perhaps in this way we will always communicate. Trading stout notes from miles distant, subtle jokes and suggested movies and necessary pep talks. The things that define humility and worth.

Elizabeth, we grow older. Nothing is predictable. Life is a succession of moments and it is in these moments that we shape ourselves. I hand you these papers with pride, with the knowledge that I may look back from the perch of forever and know that I met love with thankfulness and honesty. Should these words resonate within you and seal an alliance forever more, then such an act is to be admired. But if, instead, it causes irreparable collapse...then maybe such an act is to be revered.

The car is still now. From a little closed patio I can see it peek above the fencing like a snail shell. Smell the ocean, face tightened by the sun.