Onion Skin
We would write each other - a lot!
All of us in the family - impossible
- there are even many letters from my father
to my brother!- stunning - as history would have it was
all silence between them.
But there were letters, details of bright new living,
penned
in the tiniest handwriting possible,
on the lightest of all papers,
the blue, self-sealing onion skin air mail sheet
which left us three folds worth of space to detail
our travels, our observatons, our current moment,
drinking a citron-pressé by a glorious fountain and its
collected punks and street artists. And the begging man
beyond, half-hidden by his sign, but entirely covered in burn scars.
The day before I was lost,
let out, the bus shut down, at the end of the line
nothing to do then but get to it -
shuffling, homesick, miles back to the center.
What has vainished from this era
is not just the letters
but the gaze, gazing itself
through an excellent smoke ring
through the lucky present
past the sparkling water
towards some (promising, was it?) opaque future
where we are now
let out again at the end of the line
unable to see back through, or navigate towards,
or even feel, locate,
the truth of it.
My father wrote my brother!
A lot!
History is revised into its own oblivion.
Habitat Loss, I might call it
I build my nest now out of advertisements
and curl there, exposed to schemes
and discounts. I drift to dream, lulled by
hypnotic self-improvement plans
that will never make me feel as clear-headed
as proud of myself
as I did, in France alone at sixteen,
knowing to write
below the address
PAR AVION
and underline it twice
so my moment
- the fountain gone salmon pink in the evening light -
my legs still on fire from my long walk back
but not like that poor man, that poor man!
who sits forever in a small curve of my brain behind a sign that
says "Merci"
might be shared
back home, far away
on this lightest of papers
the thinnest of histories
mist sprayed from the fountain
and I turned to face it
– the wriiting itself
the illegible root of memory
