eight-by-fours

10. Writing To You

It is a stump that we’d shorn from the silentest tree. It is that coil of rope that lassoed our exhaled breath. It is the shadow beneath the clothes that lie beside the bed. It is the yawning doorway, the sound of unworried air rushing in. warred It is the calendar of flesh in the days before we’d met. It is those meaningless rivers that bridges wish to span. It is the distant sound the clipped birdwings make. It is how sleep fills even a well-lighted room and blinds what sights. sighs It is the distortion of sun through a high windowpane. It is the memory of reading when the paper has burned. It is the shape of a movement unfolded over millennia. It is the place a car once parked, its emptiness inside-out. WhatIt It is the time it takes a joist to creak, or all the locks to click. It is the temperature of recently-worn winter coats. It is a sipped cup, a stirred spoon, crumb on the counter. It is the vacuous drag a body makes moving away. Whatever It is the animals we feed that then live within the body. It is the words we’d imagine except for the fear of speaking. It is the nail clippings, the hair that sticks in the drainstop. It is the way the wood curls in the humidity of summers. summer It is the rails & ties & the gullywashed gravel. It is the clock against the sun that creeps across the floor. It is the faucet dripping out a time that cannot ever be spent. It is the garbage & the refrigerator & the wet load of laundry. laundry It is the consonants that emerge from the vowels’ gaping spaces. It is the loss of high frequency comprehension in time. It is the difference between a rattle and a chatter. It is where a sigh becomes an audible admission of frailty. sole It is here again but without being exactly the same as it was. It is now but with a history of calculation & strategy. It is a death that completes what’d lived without diminishing. It is beginning to seem even after I’d known. knew