To have you back
for an hour, oh even
in a room of dream,
and to say
something to change us
back to what we never
quite were—
would it be Love,
like one match
lit against winter,
like a key
turned in the ocean?
There is no time to write them any more, those long, slow letters left on the desk for days while one paragraph hardened, then another, and consigned to a delivery that took weeks. And few have survived, since they were burned after reading or in the hours just before death. Now you find them mostly in movies about times before there were telephones. The young woman takes one to a window, breathing deeply, because she knows that to read it she will need the help of the whole sky.