A Love Letter

The words will be inscribed in neon pink,
the writing in your former lover’s hand
to you when you were seventeen years old,
and to that place in you still seventeen years old,
and to that place that will forever be
a name so deep that names will disappear
discovered late at night in dresser drawers
in the guest room of your mother’s house,
as if returning not quite home to find
yourself somehow departed, gone, and gone
to sleep at dawn on pull-out couches, shook
the quiet death rattle in your bones –
no question and no answer where it goes.
Our poems are always love letters to God.
The words we write each other seal our faith
forever bound in some most holy place,
a name so deep that names will disappear.
The paper still will smell of her perfume.
You will approach the moment of your death,
your eulogy a whisper in her voice
of what is lost and what more pure endures,
and into what most pure unknown it goes
and stays forever, locked in dresser drawers.
And you will go forever, too.
Stranded there outside yourself, unraveled
in the purple flower dawn, trembling, everything
will be taken from you, and something new will rise
into the night above Wisconsin and will spread
beyond the windows of these tiny rooms
and wider than seemed possible across
the miles and years and names of flesh:
a name so deep that names will disappear,
a star collapsing to expand forever
into the neon pink of its becoming.

 

About the Poet: Eric Delp is a poet and writer living in Oxford, Mississippi.

 

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