Wow, it's been a long month. Welcome Poem #20--
There are love letters I haven’t written yet,
notes that long to be sent.
When Dylan wrote to Cat, he misspelled
Indiana and we misspell when we’re in love,
misspell me for men, misspell room
for roam. Our letters tell another
story, they cry of a slow hang
and not a slow hand. We translate
sex as a string of firecrackers,
sometimes dot our i’s with an x,
sometimes we repeat ourselves
again
and again.
We are the handwriting of a car crash,
all bended metal, adrenalin-filled
and we walk away from the accident,
say:
We could have been
but stop speaking. There’s a buzzard
circling the freeway and his call
is similar to cat’s meow. The bird
writes love letters to the injured
driver in the other car.
I insist on walking home
and the letters I write are in my footprints,
in the fig leaf I rip from the tree.
And there’s an empty envelope
outside my home. And there’s a broken
pen on the doorstep. No one is in love
with the mail carrier, no one even cares
if he arrives.
Once I wrote a letter to my husband
in black widow bites: My love
I sometimes want to weaken you with words.
