ボケット: Boketto

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.

Ovira, the scent of this ocean fever,

our beautiful child rivering through her gentle kind face a knowing:

like a green spring breeze flaging through the trees and whispering memory over grasses damp from cutting

and now mama has lent her wings for your own inimical flight breathless in cadence,

the waxwing unslain, and the light upon the land, the love upon the sea,

this beautiful nation rocking into its future as its quaking lights up from underneath

and you swing past scent and collar: Mayfly, Red Campion, and Pear,

Spider, Love-in-a-Mist, Potter Wasp, and Red Currant

There you are

scent of this life,

root and wing of these garden moments, this cumulus titling, razing the darkness from my life

and your, yet

the sea still beckons, unarranged, ungone.

Love, not ever, not for a moment my dear, gone

Your husband