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LYNN
CROSBIE
Love Letters
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 make 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 know for sure that reading was magic, it conjured up these long
eyelashes and white Harlow hair, and the guilty bald spot 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 that they were my finest, I said, Dear Hank, the end. and
right away began working on a longer book. |