LETTERS NOT SENT: Five

To Han Solo:

I am simply trying (oh, once again!) to accept the snippiness in myself.  Would anyone be surprised if I did it? Sometimes I wonder if anyone would even notice.  I didn’t write a poem today when I first got up.  This means that I’ve missed that odd loose brain state–emergence from the fragmenting, defragging stuff of dreams.

 

To Sir Isaac Newton:

Chimpanzees don’t get backaches.  Maybe if you could grow longer arms?  Knuckle across the ground?  Would you then worry about leopards?  We’d have to live in pods then, I suppose.  I wouldn’t want to fish for termites, either.

 

To Werner von Braun:

When they said “We have died with Christ,” maybe they meant “We have accepted the inevitablity of our death, so that we may fully live.”   This day stretches ahead of me like an old rubber band that holds together a bundle of letters or a tattered cookbook.

 

To Lao Tzu:

Oversleeping leaves a part of my consciousness abandoned in dream.  I probably shouldn’t try to write until I find it, but there doesn’t seem to be a map.    I’ve been meaning to write, but somehow the time just slips by.  I’m occupied, it seems, with many things:  reading to the cats, making mittens from milkweed fluff, carving swans from bars of soap.   Have you stopped stressing out on your own personality?    I would think that the Right Man would accept it in you.

 

To the editor:

The cats are restless.  Money seems to be the preoccupation.  There are more important things, it seems to me:  orcas killing whale calves off the coast of Baja California.  Sext messages.  How I yearn for cheese.

 

To Her Majesty the Queen:

Not only is your work suffering, but your child is drifting away.  Come see us if you can get a housesitter for the dog, and if the bluebirds finish their nest, uninterrupted by swallows.

 

To a Grecian Urn:

I’m beginning to believe in angels again–oh, not the pre-Raphaelite ones, but the ones who burst in screaming “Fear not!” and you wet your pants.

 

To the Benandanti:

I’ve been rereading Milton, with more sympathy this time.  I think it’s because I finally begin to understand what he means by “the worm.”

 

To Raggedy Ann:

If you don’t begin to understand that it would be best for awhile to forget about attracting a man, I don’t know what will become of you.

 

To Milton, on his Blindness:

Do you find it difficult to sleep in the dark of the moon?  I do, and wonder if it has to do with the presence of predators, back when we had no strong houses.  It’s difficult to cook meat-and-potatoes meals alongside vegan ones.

 

To my Dead Sister’s Ghost:

Is your brother better?  I think of him often, wondering how he can stand both the pain of the injury and the knowledge that he could have changed things for Ellen and you.

 

 

To a Skylark:

Have you noticed that as the sun sets later, your knees are more likely to ache?