Letters to Gonzalo de Vigo

bittersweet mouths,
vines or biologies
it burrows or drowns,
It prophesizes for me
but with a needle & thread
I could heart-stitch the bridge,
the overlap in close whispering,
harvesting the wind
from the mast,
a fickleness, a gasping,
a mourning at your absence;
I have no words to tell you how
it might have been, I can only feel
what you are. Perhaps
I could tap the wholeness
in the questing, the heart of it --
& drink it before you noticed
the black rivers and beneath
Poe's floorboards,
the stilled hauntings, organic
beatings, the resurrection
of my most cherished dreaming;
I murdered no one.

I must release it, untangle
& let loose all
those coarse counting blackbirds,
free to the green burning fields
& across the meadows
that used to rim the woods
outside my backdoor
before you came & chopped down
the white rowan & the cedar
to smoke out
your demons.

I wear the fabric
of all our soot-singed intentions,
the elbows are worn through
& muddied from devoted use,
like leather ottomans
& your lost pacific boots.
the long shadows, milky
& hushed into corners, all sound
all color, stripped by the day,
like the sunny furrowed flesh
from which the salt
had pulled its liquid & raised
the pads of your fingertips
into small topographies.

I will suck up
my maroon-blooded mariner,
with those flexible organs
sometimes present
in inebriated animals or floral roots,
& cast him back out
of the wood; the up-pulled
marigolds to chew,
the sleepy belladonna
the coaxing swarm
of aphids in our purple
garden brassicas,
the sky & its arrows
of southern tipping birds
pointing to the truth
that I am your compass, & you
meriting the highest potency
of my affections,
sitting harbored & anchored
by the phoenix at the hearth
stirring my essence, an aromatic
and emotive fire, whose ash
sifts collected
into jars, onto shelves
in log cabins. I can still hear
the creak of the ship,
the tap-tap on chinking
from tender-buttoned rooms.

Reviews

[W.k.kortas]

Nice use of marine images to tie in with de Vigo--it's judicious, where a lesser writer may have beaten us about the head and shoulders with the comparison. It's wistfulness puts me in mind of Pound's river-merchant's wife poem, but the loss here is more tangible, more bitter. This is very intelligent, very powerful work--it offers all the stylistic material any academic can ask to chew on, but it is far from a bloodless set piece.