February 8, 2020
Dear Brynn,
It makes me happy to know you were writing that day. I know those liminal spaces and “how the fields slowly wake,” as you say. In this month of remembrance, I send you my love for that difficult terrain.
I do find that memories go underground and “flood us on their own time.” I also find that they float above and around us. They’re definitely in us—bone, blood, mouth, heart. Memory as the buried and the floating. It is liberating to know I only have so much control, though. It’s like poetry or the letter form. It’s larger than us.
I don’t know. But yes, you and I are definitely writing into a particular abyss. Your mother seeing “starlings bursting low over the orchards.” Gorgeous line and image. I wonder about her kind of abyss, if she has one. Her and the starlings. Joy. Your father shooting from the three point line, nothing but net.
The haunting? I hear it like scraping, like a ghost at a window, not trying to escape or enter but rather simply to be heard. Remembered. I see and hear the haunting in every ocean, in every chorus of wind through a tree. The haunting but also the light. I’m always noticing light. How do you notice it?
Yes, I can relate to the writing and the undoing. When I enter that space where language, history, the present, and the future are so intensely combined into one singular idea, I’m gone. The etymology of “undo” is “to unfasten, release, or open.” Maybe this is what we do when we write. We release traumas or open into new directions beyond grief.
One last question for now, related to your stunning title, The Palace of Contemplating Departure. I love the idea of you in a palace or a palace of the mind, contemplating leaving. What would a palace of contemplating arrival look like? To what or whom are you now arriving?
Dear Brynn, dear sister in poetry, I’m so deeply grateful for your friendship and your light in the world. Write again when you can.
With love,
Lee