Maybe I left it in that last book I was reading: PROSE, the writings of Elizabeth Bishop,
hoping it would learn a thing or two about dexterity rubbing up against the art of description
while bristling off the shores of Nova Scotia and those precipitous saintly white cliffs. That
seems
as probable a place as any, there, among the anguished ruins, rising from the ashes, that sort of
thing,
Homeric, you might say, only to be discovered centuries later in a quarry of rouged stone,
like a favorite shade of lipstick unearthed from a bottomless purse. Marianne and Elizabeth
are meeting at a dock right now, buying it a one-way ticket on a steamer, kissing it off with their
ghostly lips. I can see it now at the helm navigate inside the weather, the open spaces,
the opulent lotions
of wind, or going for a record breaking swim across the Atlantic, (that’s more like it) later,
toweling off to pick violets, and muse over weeds frugal galaxies, rearranging itself even as I
speak, like I might
rearrange a flower adrift in a vase of flowers that aren’t blooming, giving it more room to
breathe, say,
on a table that gathers sunlight, say, near curtains disrobing a window as the sky un-clouds and
the sun
burns a hole in it. It might have gone for a stroll last night and locked itself out while imaging
stars against a black backdrop, downsizing the night to fit the vacancies of the heart, the body’s
dark folds; the spleen. It’s
three o’clock in the morning and I have thought of nothing but you all night curling like the
waves off Nova Scotia, dragging your feet along its rocky beach tossing empty beer bottles over
your Archimedean
shoulders, an archaeology of emeralds, a tiny sea scroll, what you pick up, what you hold to your
ear, the night around you, Elizabeth with her head in her hands, Marianne chronicling the speed
of a starfish.