Godspeed
Our train was the first to leave. My formulation of the question, a small bird splayed on the tracks. Now the memory of the memory of a landscape. That sheet of ice holding everything in place. The felled tree the telephone wires an entire snow-covered field. The car and its passengers. Yes. There is an elegance to the way one strikes a match. Line of smoke against a reflection of the shore, the little sea as it darkens. Each of the flowers lit as if from the inside.
Facts About the Shore
The whole time we’re speaking, your other wife traces figures in the sand. Little hourglass atop Rousseau’s desk, logic and its raptures. How cold the light is as it strikes the coast. The insides of the flowers have gone dark and now their mouths are frozen shut. Dear ______, dear impossibility, dear husband, this is your atoll. A low sky murmurs just above us and none of the ships will ever make it back to the dock. Snow falls on the other wife, on your small white boat, on the ice. When you look away from the ocean, I do my best to hold still. I try to ache more beautifully.
To Be a Part
I fasten the latch when I mail the envelope. The whole time I’m wondering if you’ve done this before. What was her name and in the morning what did you call her. As a young girl I had a box of what the other children called “gifts,” but really they were just blank sheets of paper. There’s no such thing as luck. The room just keeps burning until the door is nearly impossible to touch. Now it’s as if the thought of you has become a detail in the landscape. So I climb through the fissure to retrieve a part of the letter that I know is missing, but the entire ledge caves in, and I panic. Little aperture beneath Spinoza’s casket, destruction and its possibilities. I tell the mail carrier not to leave, but there’s a year’s worth of postage due and I haven’t had any work at the office in months.
