Company isn't possible if you aren't inhabiting yourself.
I love my pen unconditionally.
Really? What if it stopped—.
Even discarding broken things is challenging—when we have a history.
Your pen is an instrument with no free will or agency.
Are you saying I want all my relationships to be—.
Not at all—loving your pen is a start.
I have an enormous capacity to—.
And it fucks you up—until you cannot tell your feelings from those of others.
Yes.
Can you appreciate yourself as much as a pen?
Much more—.
You're just having a moment—in a glade of moments.
I messed up some dates.
Your near aftermath of me leaving is like a blanket in reverse.
I hate it.
Just remember that this proximity to death will lesson as it increases.
That makes no sense.
You keep forgetting you aren't in fictive mathematical crying often.
Not obsessed with tears—like I was. Am I doing it wrong—missing you?
Everything is wrong—you feel wrong in your every move—just remember that's all fiction—just like my death is fiction.
I wish this were a novel.
You won't write it—.
That's not what I mean. I wish I could wake up from the accumulating losses.
Yes that's precisely what I advise—and any time you fall into—predicament—wake up—again.
The waste of a word.
Wasted word?
Thrown
over by waiting, wastrels.
The word you won't mention.
No naming words.
The word impedes every precipice.
Meaning—.
Not to be hijacked—but to go on igniting pinafores—attending emptiness.
Calling former varieties of starlight.
To stand nearer to—.
An
inclination requiring discrete and otherworldly illumination.
But when you speak to me—.
Light scatters everywhere—so much of it—I can see only—.
The color blue yesterday was a signal.
Meaning—.
I'm just trying to communicate by whatever means
possible.
Tripping on words again. Words are transitory.
And doubt—.
Another form of contraction—try this—stand in your own.
Sentences?
Belonging with no belonging—.
Explain.
A friend spoke of accumulation.
And I replied in grave vowels and then—appreciations.
What if you spent an entire day writing letters—by hand—and sent them to persons.
As a constitutional practice—yes—I'll write to L with one of our conversations and to B with whatever I can—images—and to those you owe a book.
You could make a book of letters but start small—the idea of being your hand relating to paper as person.
A winter project for everyone.
To combat the smallness of screens. How they constrict bodies.
An aside as every side—and I could write beside the fire. Who has time to write letters.
The one with no time—no distinctions—plenty of unnamed words.
Correspondence was something else—to be sent without expectation.
To send an errand—a visitation—a thread by hand. However—handed—re-install the opposite of precipice.
Sad—that accumulation of losses—and then—looking up at the sky taking to my father.
And the blue started to light up everywhere—startlingly and unmistakably.
Then a blue 'M' and I thought—that's not from my father—it was from you—.
Like when we wrote our book and I told you—don't worry—the title will light up.
Your blue aura arrived today—so I can see through your deepening—woodstove.
Don't
forget my sage advice—get on with your fucking life—and also the way I used
to say on the telephone—tootle-loo.
I want to write a letter to each of your letters.
What
you want is your sisters to approximate sentences.
I want to take all of your good advice.
You recognize something in my voice—but I'm the younger sister not the older.
Attempts at slowing thoughts swirling like marbled paper.
My advice isn't good—isn't advice—you are reading my private letters.
I must go through everything—but not "things."
Distracted by 'the time of year thou mayst in me—.'
Commercialism of leaves as the new curbside cereal.
Not cerebral but fragile.
Not soft or pliable—fire. Who you were wasn't paper.
Pine, love is not a distanced stitch.
As if hands made anything farther or further.
The difference being—a grace one wishes for especially when meeting calamity.
Ok, all, call, amity.
Words inside of words.
As a calling.
Like a blue couch is a plush threshold.
A bird, an eyedropper, a flower captive in a book.
Like this one.
In a frilled collar.
Fritillary—a
tribe of butterflies in the sub family Heliconiiae. Yesterday you saw
her—cloudless sulphur-pierdae.
There is a question I want to ask—which is—.
As long as the words are unanswerable.
Several questions, actually all of them illegible.
Or—they frighten themselves away.
Let's start with where you are or are going to be at any given time.
I had what I wanted and couldn't bear it.
Of course—but snap out of it—you also saw how discernment is useful but doubt can be poison and your body isn't always the best judge of itself.
Though honesty isn't anything to be afraid of. SO you want to know how to be many places at once or how to be still and—.
Everywhere—so you don't have to keep rushing.
What is the exact amount of movement—.
To un-spell sinister plots against—now.
Concocted by—?
Humans are inordinately sacrificing of our best gifts.
Do you still call yourself human?
I speak in every tense at once—so what does it matter—.
So you call yourself many things—.
Not the rain.
Which ruins a sacred walk.
Waters it—so stop considering anything to be solved and don't move impulsively.
Move how?
'Innerly.'
And then—.
This other rising you describe—why don't you trust—'relax.'
Only fire lately.
Laynie Browne’s recent books include: Practice Has No Sequel, Intaglio Daughters, and Letters Inscribed in Snow. She edited the anthology A Forest on Many Stems: Essays on The Poet’s Novel. Honors include a Pew Fellowship and the National Poetry Series Award. She teaches and coordinates the MOOC Modern Poetry at University of Pennsylvania.
