Writing in the Light, by Jennifer K Dick

after Laynie Browne's On the Multiplicitous Poetries of Lee Ann Brown & p 1 of the book Tri/via by Michelle Naka Pierce and Veronica Corpuz (Erudie Fangs/ PUB LUSH books, 2003)

Dear,

Only a day beyond your departure. Sheets washed, sofa refolded. Somewhere over the Atlantic, perhaps the history of geographical delineation. Went for a stroll, taught a class, ate lunch. Did I mention the dreamlessness? The day’s too thin to contain. Each slip a note of where the rain stops. Did you say propped against? As in doorways, or shutters? She says shudder but I still think suder, as in to weld, in French, here that is, in a book describing vibrations. I’m never sure how to record the minutes, the moments’ passage. Notebooks line the walls in digital time, this is just a series of numbers, lines and circles. We are drawing to each other over expanses, as in cabled. You may fail to remember it as I do, but any other book might just as easily suffice. The subway, a mechanical catwalk, screeches me through tunnels. I can’t touch light from original decomposition. It is like her flyleaf, thinned wax to paper rice. Will you regret that silence now? Only the platform contains this much shadow after midnight. Fluctuate between a house just, and where you are. Nothing as simple as then. Wondering between sleeps whether states might bargain, each offer better than the last, a horseshoe angled between luck’s clovering. The language is the way things cleave or are cleaved. Did he say to or was it from? I am not sure whether you will consult your OED or the oracles. Wake up. That is what I keep telling myself. The city grey as yellow leaves. Wilt and pile up, like a scene in that script, you know the one, already catching fire. To participate, project. Certainly, new meanings for familiar words explain everything, as in timetables of confusion pinpointing the tint of what it is still to be delivered. There is an extensive process at work. We are organic. Hold up your hand if you can see this. We range in terms of subject pronoun contenting, or –tion. How solicitous, she said, stepping on his toe. Even a cosmic game of telephone might not get us there.