ボケット: Boketto

ボケット: Boketto

(letters to a wife, found in a box)

Letter 1

Dear Love,

木心

To you, even in winter, full-bellied,

I wobble and space my hope toward home.

To rhyme the darkness with ringing:

bead against wrist, tooth against tongue

and the boom of your heart click, swaying.

Words, like small billows under hull, tiller the jib of my meandering thoughts. Pictures, like wisps of exhalation, rudder the carriage of my body’s hinting. I have always worked both, rhyme and flap, to set my life’s navigation right—Ballast of Boom and Keel—the steerage from which I have tried to helm my way home. A halyard in its pulling.

How does one see through the clouded time of unseeing, especially when they themselves tell stories with pictures while all along they have struggled with the nature of how to see. So, it is me.

I am blind,

You as the moonlight on the water, the hair of a lovers' slumbering hair across my chest in the cool and rounded belly of the night....

pieta and the thinness of our wire souls

Night was meant for us: food, sex, dreams, poetry, cats screaming, tears, loss, hope, food, your brain's songs and the waiting for the sun to tickle up in the morning. Did you father fear this when I entered your life?

Did he worry the lines under my eyes, the twined scars across my chest: for those that dare the light and bending of their neck, risk loss but are rewarded by winged love:

the sky which towers over stone and bronze and wood and our hearts.

the heroic veins on your legs, a remarkable, entangled forest....and all that age, old age, lost upon your young skin....eruption and ignition and starburst.....winging.

Love, H

Letter 2

Dear Light,

The rare light umbrellas storm-ward and catches both wind and the swarming that ignites from the seasonal change, the gnats that scatter from the grass like poppy-seed or black-winter salt thrown over ice crisp and alight with sound in the diminutive luster, the bees that hone upward, chasing the crevasses and dents of a cloud’s face, incandescent as phosphorous mountaining up an altitudinal giant, the dew ascending from the cupping of late-afternoon warmth and the frequencies of language and sound gone awry in this late September timbre. All this enchantment and all the eruption which recall the distance from where I sit among the change of thought and temperature, scampering toward that which is you. Becoming. Sift these words like husk and the fingers in one another’s mouth.

I stare horizon-long and look for you in the late summer ascension, the barn swallows arabesque in the dimming light nuanced by weight and the memory of cinnamon (not spice but carriage and absent poundage), the winging of the early-jetting bats whose youth is feverish and eager and the flapping of bird and mammal which I glove and toss distant from this drying land toward the watery spaces from which you speak to me from afar. Later, the cars’ headlights at speak of desire and loss in their carving of speed or spinning, for you are not here to skirt them in the lit-up walk home and the shadows that remind us of other certainties. At night, you tired your stories against my chest like darned socks balled. In the morning we exchanged dream-tales like recipes for the awakening.

Writing a letter in absence of your presence, I distance the miles in an alphabet of phonemes and clutter. Love as sound. Meaning as the negotiation of pattern: the streetlamp under which you picked the insect bite at your knee, the wisp of a strand or two of your hair that fell like dandelion stuck from breath on the upper lip and forefinger. The stone that you found, suddenly, in your pocket like a forgotten receipt. The box opened in the old woman’s shop that carved out juniper and allspice. The algebra of desire and the dissipating light.

Distance pulling, the pulse at run and of you.

We scatter ourselves, though the distance fans like prints in muddy sand, and declare the spaces and the pace of us, elongated and holy.

My love, I am leaving: take the stars into your mouth and count them at night and they will speak my name.

Husband

Letter 3

Dear Tenderness,

木心

To you, even in winter, full-bellied,

I wobble and space my hope toward home.

To rhyme the darkness with ringing:

bead against wrist, tooth against tongue

and the boom of your heart click, swaying.

Words, like small billows under hull, tiller the jib of my meandering thoughts. Pictures, like wisps of exhalation, rudder the carriage of my body’s hinting. I have always worked both, rhyme and flap, to set my life’s navigation right—Ballast of Boom and Keel—the steerage from which I have tried to helm my way home. A halyard in its pulling.

How does one see through the clouded time of unseeing, especially when they themselves tell stories with pictures while all along they have struggled with the nature of how to see. So, it is me. I am blind

moonlight on the water, like the hair of a lovers’ slumbering hair across my chest in the cool and rounded belly of the night....

pieta and the thinness of our wire souls

I am smalling, hold me.

Love,

Husband

Letter 4

Dear Night

Lace, butterscotch, Bao, 鹹酥雞, the color of your toes in the morning, wild Sockeye (Oncohynchus nerka) and blush. These are my words as you wait:

Words rise then plummet and in this dance scatter wild and caught up in the wind’s greed, distance and vocabulary like a feather-before-quill, ill-equipped to steady from a swan’s hock along the lake, the remaining and the squawking when you chased the birds toward the horseshoe of aqueous expanse with a grape and a handful of hope: the algebra of laughter. Neither tar nor defecating green but ellipse and enduring and winged noise (who listens to the small ticks as the necks crane just so?). The grammar of distance and the ache all caught up in that space of horizon and flutter where you await these words. A letter, some food, a color and a rhyme. Waiting, shall I begin?

So this: the rare light, wife, umbrellas storm-ward and catches both wind and the swarming that ignites from seasonal change, the gnats scatter from the grass like poppy-seed or black-winter salt thrown over ice, crisp and alight with sound in their diminutive lustre, the bees hone upward chasing the crevasses and dents of a cloud’s face, incandescent as phosphorous mountaining an altitudinal giant, the dew ascends from the cupping of late-afternoon warmth and the frequencies of language go awry in this late September timbre. All this enchantment and all that eruption which recall the distance from where I sit among the change of thought and temperature and yet scamper toward that which is you. Becoming. Sift these words like husk and the fingers in one another’s mouth. Tides and tongue again, wife. Tides and tongue.

So, I stare horizon-long and look for you in the late summer ascension, the barn swallows arabesque the dimming light nuanced by weight and the memory of cinnamon (not spice but carriage and absent poundage), the winging of the early-jetting bats whose youth is feverish and eager and the flapping of bird and mammal which I glove and toss afar from this drying land toward the watery hips from which you speak to me. Later, the cars’ headlights chew upon speech and signal desire and loss in their carving of speed and spinning, for you are not here to skirt them in the lit-up walk home and that absence is a cantilever of iron and rope and joint, waking the night. The shadows that remind us of other certainties. The fauna that is more than faux sentiment but goes swampy in your absence. At night, alone, I scribble that you once tired stories against my chest like darned socks, balled and balladry. In the morning we exchanged dream-tales like recipes for the awakening. In the morning, geography spells out countenance, teeth indentured along the skin.

My all of you, even in the loss, I am re-grown in your arms and my broken heart branches across the world.

Love, not ever gone

Husband.

Letter 5

Dear World-within-World

To write you is to love you. To love you is to reimagine distance not as measurable loss but as calm. Does the milkweed pod consider the journey before it bends toward collapse and rivering divestment? To write a letter in the absence of your presence, I distance the miles in an alphabet of phonemes and clutter. Love as sound. Meaning as the negotiation of pattern: the street lamp under which you picked the insect bite at your knee, the wisp of a strand or two of your hair that fell like dandelion stuck from breath on the upper lip and forefinger. The stone that you found, suddenly, in your pocket like a forgotten receipt. The box opened in the old woman's shop that carved out juniper and allspice. The algebra of desire and the dissipating light.

Distance pulling, the pulse at run and of you.

Instead of words, let me finger the mechanics of weather, pick apart Winter's expectant thaw as the bump and grind of joinery, the scent of which I anticipate when opening an aged box in Kensington Market, the pictures and lace and thumbprints that were missing, but the dark square emitted, jasmine and cotton week and string jasmine. Is not the sweep of the world's radius amplitude of scent and syllable: allspice, juniper, mugword, and marjoram leave, moth-eaten and calculable by you?

As I stretch to finish this letter, a burning slowly fills the room, not fire or smoke or repulsion but settlement. For it makes sense that the final words speak of a different form, palimpsest and ghost walk. As I finish the last line, I shall bend the letter into a kind of origami, or slightly weathered towel. As fold this note, I shall recall the way you upheld and twirled your hair after shampooing, more softening than the permutations of neatness. And once words are bent and the paper small enough to fit in my palm, I shall set it on fire with the matches we found on the table that was not our own. After the paper takes a liking to the heat, I shall drop into the blue rice bowl you said reminded you of your grandmother, veiny and stained by rain and let the words smoke signal any last syllable that I have forgotten. And after the paper is birdlime, the color of the mountain night and after the words are parted like pinecone dropped on that woody path along Hualien's cliffs, and when the amber embers have cobbed, I shall take each piece, like cut-sections of pineapple brazed, and place them in my mouth. And I will not chew but swallow, wafer and water and kohl, until the letters and thoughts are absorbed in my body and the language will synch will by chemistry and digestion, residing in the space inside my organs and blood and breath oxygenated by hormone, elixir and process. All of this in anticipation when we are together and for the inevitable parting when I die so that my body's disintegration will be furtherance and living rather than dissipation. The dandelions and the reeds and the high-mountain tea shall flourish from the words as my body slips its way back into the soil and sand and root and the words slip out as nutrient and lace. That is the nourishment your love and your patience has provided. Bountiful and breedy.

From thirst and the meal that you once gave, all of that fecund balming will delta out: love and language and tissue. In that burning of paper and the swallowing of language, the earth will union has we have and this infirm body shall stir and spread soil-ward with both the breaking-down of my biology into another embryology and the soil upon which these words first made sense not lost to oblivion but burnished into a reconstruction.

Take that soil and plan anew my love for one day when we are forgotten that nourishment and picked-apart papyrus will one day shelter another couple and another and another under which the shadow of the tree grown from that divesture will cool during the summer humidity and hubris and though they shall not know our names nor our love, they shall know shade, the sheltering under the cavernous sky from which danger and diminution mark out against relief. And so I strike the match and as the ignition sings like a wasp passing, here come the lilacs and the conifers and that entire wait. But that is still generationally ahead and I am calm.

All that contained in the purview as I await you and turn briefly toward the land as we scatter ourselves, though the distance fans like prints in muddy sand, it awakes and muscles and fragments. Can you hear that and the spittle of the kiss when wood meets phosphorous and carbon, radiant and kindling?

So breathe and bide my wife through the waiting and recall the moments written by both

long past the shadow and the ash, the chestnut and the laurel,

and declare the spaces and the pace of us elongated

and holy.

your,

Husband

Letter 6

Dear Beloved,

Body as language and the continent of wielded words surrounding as left a divestiture

Worlds alight here along the cars of st claire

My looming along the spine of Formosa

Call the rhyme, clack the crack in the tea cup

Teetering

This is the season when folk weight themselves down by the gifts they carry and i watch them as i gambol through the rain and think thus:

The tug inside my fame and carriage you created in a dollar-less giving, without expending accounts, and which does not weigh down but bullys gravity and i am aflight from that.

Bagless, i am electric from that gift that marks my walking, invisibly.

To find purchase in the weight of free arms because you gifted me with wonder that cannot be purchased nor pitched into a clever, seasonal shopping bag

Carapace and Movement

Suddenly (once i scribbled long ago),

winter (now the autumnal light) broke through my window

(now along the fickle length of my arm)

as if a phone call in the den of night

and pried my bones (android digits) from the fat caging my heart,

and you were there:

sea and voice and suddenly

11 time zones away, you awoke me.

Your voice, all Nemo and bubble and 10,000 leagues afar,

is enough to cadence this:

the stones may gravel and the machinations of our jobs (stilted maths)

may fuck us,

but we shall not resist the simpler thing:

You carry a bucket of light in your voice and the sea grows wide from

testament.

The grist of the moving of place, of boxes felled by time and imprint,

the rattle in the carrying that reminds, the upland, the stains,

the spider newspaper printing along the corner of a poem once thought sent:

the webs in the corner, the wash and the light at the end of the throat.

This call our Archimedes, that shall be our Orion.

And there is no app that can replace that, no code, no nimble mind,

the 1's and 0's nothing compared with the shape of voice cascading,

the tiger run around the tree, and we shaped into butter.

Final Letter

Dear 翼, 兔子

The pacific shells up the tales carried on the back of what is awashed,

picked up forlorn and plated between us.

Turn, swerve, propinquities’ night,

I am coming home to you.