Russell Thornton

I threw away your letters.

Years ago, just like that.

The tight black swirls,

circles and strokes

filling fine sheets —

I would not see them again.

The last items I had left.

The dates. The phrases.

The things you said. Forfeited.

Snowflake patterns.

Leaf diagrams.

Crushed. Melted. Dissolved.

The flooding runoff

at the backed-up

street corner drain

collects it all.

Only the opening

of a strong seal far below

could allow that pool

of darkening rainwater

to run and drop away

between the slats.

If I were to recover

the lost key of the cursive,

I would in one instant

want back again what I saw

in the images

the hand traced out for me.

And would be denied

even the little

the letters kept of you

and be released

into nothing but more time.

Anniversaries circle round again. My grandparents

marrying in the sun. The guests in their best attire.

The filled vaulted room. Then the clinking glasses.

Then the private rites of those who waited long.

It is there in the light. Light that is a window.

And is a mirroring seas for my grandmother

out in the sailing ship of her wedding dress. Her ashes.

Someone I loved dying alone. The month the wide frame

of her final leaving. It was also her birth month. Light

opens its window, and is window upon window.

Her living hair darkens beyond its living black.

That black is another light, no visible sun

burning in its origins but a dark transparency,

and it arrives like another her, again and again.

I too am a window. In August, two people

among the dead look out of it. They do not know

the window is me. And I am what a window can wish.

To open endlessly because it is light,

and because it is a mirror, let the silver erase itself

and arrive and wait flawless on the glass,

and darken, and erase itself, like life, like death.

Once, I would make certain my name

did not appear in any directory. Now

I dream I am back in different times and places,

and the people I remember I loved

are not there, and the places not at all

as they were, and it is as if I have belonged

to some underground organization

set up to allow no member

to betray another – no member ever

knowing who his associates actually are.

Now I agree to be listed, I ask to be listed –

and hope that this will make it easy to find me.

And now I dream of a list. On it

everything I and those I have been with

have ever truly felt or done is recorded

in the clearest detail. In the same dream

is a man who walks alongside me and knows

nothing but the entire list by heart,

and will recite it to the moment I die,

and then he too will disappear.