Letters of Note

"Correspondence deserving of a wider audience."

http://www.lettersofnote.com/

Look at That Shirt

picture by Sandy Kim

Excerpt from “To A Sad Daughter,”

by Michael Ondaatje 
One afternoon I stepped
into your room. You were sitting
at the desk where I now write this.
Forsythia outside the window
and sun spilled over you
like a thick yellow miracle
as if another planet
was coaxing you out of the house
—all those possible worlds!—
and you, meanwhile, busy with mathematics.
I cannot look at forsythia now
without loss, or joy for you.
You step delicately
into the wild world
and your real prize will be
the frantic search.
Want everything. If you break
break going out not in.
How you live your life I don’t care
but I’ll sell my arms for you,
hold your secrets forever.
If I speak of death
which you fear now, greatly,
it is without answers.
except that each
one we know is
in our blood.
Don’t recall graves.
Memory is permanent.
Remember the afternoon’s
yellow suburban annunciation.
Your goalie
in his frightening mask
dreams perhaps
of gentleness.

For Grace, After a Party

by Frank O'Hara 

 You do not always know what I am feeling.
Last night in the warm spring air while I was
blazing my tirade against someone who doesn't
interest
         me, it was love for you that set me
afire,

      and isn't it odd? for in rooms full of
strangers my most tender feelings
                                   writhe and
bear the fruit of screaming. Put out your hand,
isn't there
              an ashtray, suddenly, there? beside
the bed?  And someone you love enters the room
and says wouldn't
                   you like the eggs a little

different today?
                 And when they arrive they are
just plain scrambled eggs and the warm weather
is holding.

The Oregon Trail is undergoing photosynthesis

by Gregory Sherl 
I want to write a sad poem but I’m not sad.
I am less than sad. Negative sad. I am looped
television laughter. I move through the trail
cloaked in bath water & the water never gets cold.
I shouldn’t be sad or sleep all day, I should lie
under the floorboards of our wagon, tell the spiders
to mind their distance, just swallow the poison.
i want to wrestle the bear that haunts your dreams
& eats our children. They are beautiful children,
in their hiking boots, climbing hills like they’ve
done this before, like they know why we sleep
on top of each other, so preious all of us humming
last spring. I want to lust for lust & your tongue
over my shoulder blades, but all I can think about
is building a snowman with your face on its white
frame. Your teeth look the best when you’re naked.
I close my eyes, count to ten thousand. I close my
eyes & forget why I closed my eyes. On the trail
everything smells green. You tell me I always want
to smell naked. A thief comes in the middle of the night,
leaves wild fruit, a note that says he found God
in a Wal-Mart parking lot. When we’re older I’ll lock
the front door of our house so tight the calcium
in our bones won’t be able to get out. 

The Heat of Autumn

by Jane Hirshfield
The heat of autumn
is different from the heat of summer.
One ripens apples, the other turns them to cider.
One is a dock you walk out on,
the other the spine of a thin swimming horse
and the river each day a full measure colder.
A man with cancer leaves his wife for his lover.
Before he goes she straightens his belts in the closet,
rearranges the socks and sweaters inside the dresser
by color. That’s autumn heat:
her hand placing silver buckles with silver,
gold buckles with gold, setting each
on the hook it belongs on in a closet soon to be empty,
and calling it pleasure.

Prom

 I love people. 

A Story About The Body

by Stephen Dunn
The young composer, working that summer at an artist’s colony, had
watched her for a week. She was Japanese, a panter, almost sixty,
and he thought he was in love with her. He loved her work, and her
work was like the way she moved her body, used her hands, looked
at him directly when she made amused and considered answers to his
questions. One night, walking back from a concert, they came to her
door and she turned to him and said, “I think you would like to have
me. I would like that too, but I must tell you that I have had a double
mastectomy,” and when he didn’t understand, “I’ve lost both my
breasts.” The radiance that he had carried around in his belly and chest
cavity — like music — withered very quickly, and he made himself look
at her when he said, “I’m sorry. I don’t think I could.” He walked back
to his own cabin through the pines, and in the morning he found a small
blue bowl on the porch outside his door. It looked to be full of rose
petals, but he found when he picked it up that the rose petals were on
top; the rest of the bowl— she must have swept them from the corners
of her studio — was full of dead bees.

The Rival

by Sylvia Plath
if the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
you leave the same impression
of something beautiful, but annihilating.
both of you are great light borrowers.
her o-mouth grieves at the world; yours is unaffected.
and your first gift is making stone out of everything.
i wake to a mausoleum; you are here,
ticking your fingers on the marble table, looking for cigarettes,
spiteful as a woman, but not so nervous,
and dying to say something unanswerable.
the moon, too, abases her subjects,
but in the daytime she is ridiculous.
your dissatisfactions, on the other hand,
arrive through the mailslot with loving regularity,
white and blank, expansive as carbon monoxide.
no day is safe from news of you,
walking about in africa maybe, but thinking of me.

Atlantis- A Lost Sonnet

by Eavan Boland
How on earth did it happen, I used to wonder
that a whole city—arches, pillars, colonnades,
not to mention vehicles and animals—had all
one fine day gone under?
I mean, I said to myself, the world was small then.
Surely a great city must have been missed?
I miss our old city —
white pepper, white pudding, you and I meeting
under fanlights and low skies to go home in it. Maybe
what really happened is
this: the old fable-makers searched hard for a word
to convey that what is gone is gone forever and
never found it. And so, in the best traditions of
where we come from, they gave their sorrow a name
and drowned it.

Bloom

Bloom by Anna Schuleit is an installation in the soon to be demolished Massachusetts Mental Health Center. Anna and her team filled the center with a variety of nearly 28,000 plants and invited past patients and family to reflect on their time there.

I feel like a single Dippin' Dot.

His Ma

Dimensions of Dialogue

Destino

Destino: a collaboration between Salvador Dali and Walt Disney.

She Thinks of Him on Her Birthday

by Deborah Garrison
 
It’s still winter,
and still I don’t know you
anymore, and you don’t know

me. But this morning I stand
in the kitchen with the illusion,
peeling a clementine. Each piece

snaps like the nickname for a girl,
the tinny bite it was 
to be one once. Again I count

your daughters and find myself in the middle,
the waist of the hourglass,
endlessly passed through and passed through

but holding nothing, dismayed
by the grubby February sun
I was born under and the cheap pleasure

it gives the window. Yet I raise the shade
for it, and try not to feel it is wrong
to want spring, to be a season

further from you—not wrong to wish
for a hard rain, a hard wind
like one we sat out in together
or came in from together.

Ice Cube Celebrates the Eames

Those Winter Sundays

by Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early

and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,

then with cracked hands that ached

from labor in the weekday weather made

banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.

When the rooms were warm, he’d call,

and slowly I would rise and dress,

fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,

who had driven out the cold

and polished my good shoes as well.

What did I know, what did I know

of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Waxing and Waning

I was in wax

And the whole world was in jelly

My hands, my nails

Were crabs, were snails.

I feared the blue wall in the hill

and when the sky was bruised

When my hands felt cold and dead

I wanted to lay them down to bed

But I was in wax

And the whole world was in jelly.

I feared rooms with radiators and wicker

you were too afraid of unhappiness.

Your hands, your hair,

were always everywhere.

While flowers were fat and blooming in the snow,
peaches were rotting in the kitchen bowl.

Thin Pipes

 Love slithered across the newly uncarpeted floor that night and met me in my empty room. "Will you find the empty clam shells here too?" it asked. "You're disgusting," I sneered and felt that I was doing what I only did when I fell asleep angry. Love slithered into my new closet and choked itself around the bar that would soon hang all of my dresses. "Stop." Love released its grip and dropped to the floor in a way that only something with no arms or legs could. I nailed the closet shut and moved out before I could move in.

            You smell like sleep and tears.

 The deeply Catholic Wolfgang Amadeus pried and prodded and I wept and could feel the source of warmth weeping too. He asked if I wanted clams for breakfast. We had clams for breakfast. When I tasted the bread it was bitter. When I tasted the clams they were bitter. When I tasted my tears I thought they might taste sweet like lemonade. They too were bitter.

Damn it Ann, don't look at me that way! You don't want my help? Just do what you're supposed to do.

Josephine, patroness of roses, convinced me that unpeeling oranges shouldn't make me feel dusted, convinced me that walking in lots shouldn't soak me in tar. I followed her and Green like the wind and grabbed their hooks so that I would not have to bother walking. My time with Josephine was always marred by the nights when I would fall asleep beneath the porch, I was a cat then, and she would find me and whisper to me: "Mon amour, je t'arrache. Je t'arrache," and I would whisper back "Tear at me so that I spill beads from my lobes. Tear at me so that I drop any plates I am holding." In the morning we dressed in damp silence.

I would always wake up in tar.

One evening at dinner you fell asleep with your face in your food. I ripped a petal from the centerpiece and tiptoed out of the house through the kitchen. You never saw me again. I moved into the apartment across the street and watched you eat dinner alone. I cried. I cried. I cried. I closed the curtains. I stopped crying. I opened the curtains. I carved wax tulips in your eyes and found out you weren't lonely, you were just old which is still lonely but not in a way I could understand. I looked at your face and felt comforted by it. I felt cradled by the space above your lip and beneath your nose. I imagined myself sliding back and forth in it like I were in a rowboat and waves were lapping at the side of it, licking it with its receding peaks.

The river is flowing, flowing and growing. The river is flowing, down to the sea. River carry me, a child I will always be. River, carry me down to the sea.

The Moon Versus Us Ever Sleeping Together Again

by Richard Brautigan

I sit here, an arch-villain of romance,
thinking about you. Gee, I’m sorry
I made you unhappy, but there was nothing
I could do about it because I have to be free.
Perhaps everything would have been different
if you had stayed at the table or asked me
to go out with you to look at the moon,
instead of getting up and leaving me alone with
her.

Things

Will, will you deflower the flowered hour and lay time out around the tundra?

A harrowing halo persists and purses your coded conscience but

Curdled cream and a strangled mangle eat at the angles of marigolds

Strange is strange but proclaiming Argentine orange was stranger

Shoveling always what is already hollow

Lumps and mumps howl and scowl at the sea foam catacomb

Knowing neither Neive nor Nora nor a single Orson sporing flora

Waves

 pictures from: La Tristesse Durera Toujours

In a Cafe

by Richard Brautigan

I watched a man in a cafe fold a slice of bread
as if he were folding a birth certificate or looking
at the photograph of a dead lover.

Jeff Harris

Annie and Alvy

 The scene where Annie and Alvy go to the bookstore together wearing the same outfit always makes me so happy.  This was deliberate, right? There's no way it couldn't be. How romantic.

 This is romantic in the same way.

Funtown

King said in an interview that this photograph was taken as he tried to explain to his daughter Yolanda why she could not go to Funtown, a whites-only amusement park in Atlanta. King claims to have been tongue-tied when speaking to her. “One of the most painful experiences I have ever faced was to see her tears when I told her Funtown was closed to colored children, for I realized the first dark cloud of inferiority had floated into her little mental sky.”

Toujours

 

What am I to do?

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

by Robert Frost
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Mimesis

A series by Barbara & Michael Leisgen.

Love Poem for the Last Night on Earth

by Brian Barker
When they ask me to account for my time on earth,
I will confess: I loved tomato pie
& too much beer, waking up in the blue
beam of the television, my head in your lap,
how I could hear the last birds
gathering beneath your skin. You smelled like mint
& the cold blade of the kitchen knife, & our laughter
left teethmarks those long July days,
as the dark beyond our door culled its armies,
a combustion of insects & heat
hitching our house to the blind grasses, the pasture
sliding away like a calm sea.
Love, what leaned in & drank from the eyes of the horses
as their silhouettes passed like slow ships?
What folded its thin wings & sank into our hearts?