« Back to Excerpts

From Alton Bay, New Hampshire to Berlin

Kelly Allen

You asked me where I work, where, in the spring, the air pulses with agitated wings of green ephemerae, and time buzzes and blurs: week six day two, near midnight. How, in early April, each day rises from the dark, thick with frost. Last night, the motorcycles roared upstream, the world screamed hog. Tonight, my cabin stinks of wool and sweat, the wet of leather boots; my ears are stuffed from swimming through the clouds of algae in the lake. To grow so sudden into silence gives me comfort; memory of your voice abides inside my head. I stare out at the trees and bracken; the lake's deep blue is flashing, caught between the leaves of aspen and elm. You write you suffer silence-which you fill with aimless cruising past the blistered walls of cabarets. I know that silence, pallid and insatiable. To yield to silence that is palpable, now there's a grace that terrifies (oh most illuminated aegis). As deep as this damn lake that's grown me deaf-I live for someone's sake-I don't know whose-your letter I receive as gift, and throw my thanks to you across the vast expanse of age and sea. I'm not apart from anyone. My fears, they don't possess. Lower your fists, allow the world to come to you in all its hog-wallering bliss. I quit drinking, is this what it means to feel human? Angry, impatient for the morning and for joy. I wish my words would speak but art and its perfection takes its sweet and lonely time. I've lost years, fast and small as dimes; their ghosts whisper amidst these bent and fulsome trees while I still dwell in winter. Always it's a struggle to know what day it is, the hour, wondering why I have not read "the ground beneath her feet", although I read the books you sent: "the memoirs of glückel of hameln", "the shipping news"-one every night-my friend, I was silly from lack of sleep, my starved imagination fed. You speak of discontent, the aimless road you travel. How you lost your map. (Remember me and time.) I'm one to talk: old debt, no husband no rich wife, no ancient fleets of boat as income. I'm frightened and content, alive, letting the current carry me for once, rocking me within my stalwart wooden tomb. These woods. You write you feel your body disappearing; from what or whom do you wish to disappear? Name these things and mail them to me; I will gather them in a box I made from birch and send them sailing on the lake, in flames.

« Back to Excerpts