AN OPEN LETTER TO MY IMAGINARY FRIEND

I have written a song
in which I am just one bar
of soap upon which water
can play its innumerable
fingers. I grow
smaller and smaller until
I cease to exist

except in your head,
which is what I invented
it to do. In there
I can say that white cloud
and be understood
because of the field
of language where I mean

to lie down with you.
Though the wind blows
the clover away, I'm good
at keeping things
quiet. Take it,
this chain of sunlight
I've woven for our hair.

__

IN THE KINGDOM

As a child, I heard the world end when my neighbors smashed glass bottles in the alley, which happened often. To invent out of the open window of a feverish sleeplessness — anthem, dream, or certain bright apocalypse — that's the beauty we are given to bear. Who knows how we visit, or are visited. How many hands it takes to build the temple, or hammer numbers over every door.

__

"Loneliness is necessary for pure poetry," wrote Jack Spicer in a letter to Federico García Lorca, who was dead.