DEAR HUSBAND
Yesterday
I swam into the center of a dark star, the farthest point
from every other point,
the place
where people become shapes along the shore, where a mother
becomes the idea
of a mother, and a sister becomes the idea of a sister.
Here, everything is its opposite: trees, buildings, snow, Thursday, music,
boredom, regret.
Dear husband, I have been writing you letters, then erasing them,
then sending blank pages in the mail
as if to prove you really are
married
to a ghost. I swear
yesterday I dipped my hand in a pool of emptiness
and dragged up a dead dove. Do you realize what cruelty I’m capable of
when you leave me alone like this? Dear husband
I am thinking of a house with yellow curtains in a town that no one visits,
and where it always rains, a child
tying his shoelaces at the bottom
of a staircase.
Not this wind that knocks the power lines down.
Dear husband
yesterday, I unzipped the translucent skin of my tent to watch the mountains
glow pink somewhere
in Arizona. I swear
I saw a spark
ignite between two mirrors that faced each other in a field,
a silver necklace caught in the bare branches of a tree.
—from Rattle #70, Winter 2020
Rattle Poetry Prize Finalist
__________
Austen Leah Rose: “Rilke wrote a lot of letters, especially to his wife, Clara. He had to, because he was always running away from her, isolating himself in windswept castles perched on rocks by the sea. I suppose he required a certain amount of distance in order to feel intimacy. In one letter, he describes an ideal relationship: ‘I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other.’” (web)
