Correspondence

 

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