February 2, 2020
Dear Lee,
This morning: Starbucks coffee shop on Willow Avenue, my student (surprise) behind the counter, so sweet. I’m re-reading your poetry and pausing for the first time in weeks, to write. To read. Fog stretches across the dawn sun. The orchards do their whispering. We’re in the liminal winter months, our valley shrouded in mist, the fields slowly waking, a month of remembrance for so many communities — for me, a difficult time. I find myself straining to listen, desiring spring.
Memories go underground, flood us on their own time—do you find this? I’m greedy for what I can’t access immediately, everything needing to be on my terms—why?
You and I write (are writing into) an absence, in our different ways. Some letters posted here will never receive a reply. Or, perhaps the reply will visit my nightdreams, my daydreams, my poems. I think of your poem, “Three Dreams of Korea: Notes on Adoption.” I read it, again and again, as a witness, as a student of poetry’s possibilities for holding our desires, our divinations.
My mother sees starlings bursting low over the orchards and thinks of her mother.
My sister turns over the Princess of Cups, the Queen of Swords in the tarot deck and we know these are the grandmothers.
How do you hear the haunting? What do you see?
I write and the writing undoes me, do you find this? These letters have shown me: my story was never only mine; my feelings are inherited, collective; we are undone by one another.
Write when the spirit moves, dear friend.
Love & gratitude,
Brynn