Dear Devoya,
I’m on a plane chasing sundown and the sea. Flying west tonight and thinking of you in colder climates speaking your truth across oceans.
Tell me the story of your power.
My friend Brandon asked me once: what did you feel, standing in the living ruins of the spaces of our family’s confinement? In response, I wanted to lift a handful of dust from the legacy place, pour it slowly over the sea below, say: sorrow-baked earth. Soil in deep time. The muscle branch of memory, bone-tender, mesquite-strong. Fungus of history. Rhizomatic planes of human life, converging, diverging. I felt one soul then another soul, piercing the din and rising in resistance.
What did you feel? Ignorance, my own. Bewilderment at the shape of bursting creosote, crawling over the old barrack concrete foundations. Wonder at my father walking beside me. Wonder at the trembling midday heat. Sadness and the ages. The magical, horrifying past.
Devoya, I think of us, storytalking in downtown Fresno last spring, me on the brink of my southwest pilgrimage, you having just returned from the deep south—site of pain and so much knotted beauty.
I’ve had a hard time putting language to the storm-drift, the stones, the lightning.
So I ask you, fellow seeker, new friend: what did you feel?
In writing you, I feel myself breathing back to myself in southern Arizona as if to say: I see you. I, in the present, will bear what you couldn’t. Feel what was hidden to you then, bring it into language.
Writing poetry, said Linda Gregg, is like being alive twice.
Perhaps these letters serve a similar function?
Recuperate, regenerate, re-live, renew.
Dear Devoya: tell me the story of your power.
What did you feel?
Love,
Brynn