"Love Letters" (1992)

I would give my husband drawings for grocery lists,

with smiling faces on the eggs, and spider feet

dangling everywhere. I could draw letters too.

fat senseless alphabets, lexical landscapes of

pointed trees and bloated clouds. that is how I

wished words were, with changing colours and

feathers in their spines. on road signs in my

dreams, they shimmied, their Rockette heels a

variegated sunburst. unlike the stiff black

knots and stakes that glared at me from envelopes

and books. an unchanging and cruel exotica,

like smelling Cuban cigars wherever you go or

the same screaming opera. he said that I did

not need to learn with him there, reading slowly

aloud, but sometimes in silence. that drove me

insane, he would laugh or frown at something

on the page, and look as if he were a creeping

vine on a tombstone, a coffee stain on a piece

of clean manilla. I practice learning on a stack

of mail he kept in his sock drawer, and I

finally learned dear. Dear Hank, it felt like

having a perfume sample fall from a magazine

in a sweet sudden breath. it made me think of

velvet antlers, of his rumpled cardigan sweater

and my love for him, a word which slayed me,

with its clean lines and quick exhalation,

the swelling heart in its middle. I began to

scream things all day long, and I felt the first

affection for poetry through the ringing sounds

of advertisements, soapbox labels and advice to

the lovelorn columns. words were heroic, huge

killing things, and they beat in my head and

bled from my eyes and fingers. I would be ironing,

and a giant phrase or comma would barrel into

the room, its veins bulging, its arms around

my waist. Dear Hank, I miss you especially

your sexy hands, mine clenched when I got that

far and then some. then I knew for sure that

reading was magic, it conjured up these long

eyelashes and white Harlow hair, and the guilty

baldspot and shaking dewlap of my faithless

husband, adrift on the libretto of his private

life. he would still read to me in his annoying

way while I squirmed on my novels and texts,

that lay under the couch cushions like misplaced

scissors. I drew him an elaborate list one day,

of pink champagne bottles and support girdles,

and wrote my first words. I left them with his

letters, on the back of our marriage certificate,

I think they were my finest, I said, Dear

Hank, the end. and right away began working on

a longer book.