a daughter drafts a letter from earth: departure
Dear ____________,
What repair. What weather system permitting
mourning, some music, the hollowbody
dress of a loved one. What worry I do nothing
humbly—dream the branches of your blood
lines as sunprint—. Feel creased as—.
What touch I’ve nailed to me I’ve nailed to me
instead of all these cliff swallows. Their mud nests
suffocating the eaves. What refusal
to see ourselves to sleep until we rinse
our feet—. Until someone has tied red threads
around my ankle to ward off a new year. In the field-dark
the storm hovers, the cows sound
a riled sadness. What heat
lightning rising. Reverberant sky.
I am radioing from myself
to myself. Endless desert
where I thought a drop-dead
winter should be. Some nights this
is all I can do to keep from—. I drink myself into a threat
to sleep off my dress
by morning. What static electricity when we’re still
in the eye of it. Thunder slow-dilating
overhead like a train whistle. The lake swallowing
the thrill of lightning lines.
My only desire a desire to touch
—no one—for a year. Let the storm drag me
bodyless into the hush of long grasses,
fields brushed with sage, wait for someone
more remorseful—to pass through. —I’m leaving
with the perfume rising off my hair, two children
asleep in their nests.
What repair. What weather system permitting
mourning, some music, the hollowbody
dress of a loved one. What worry I do nothing
humbly—dream the branches of your blood
lines as sunprint—. Feel creased as—.
What touch I’ve nailed to me I’ve nailed to me
instead of all these cliff swallows. Their mud nests
suffocating the eaves. What refusal
to see ourselves to sleep until we rinse
our feet—. Until someone has tied red threads
around my ankle to ward off a new year. In the field-dark
the storm hovers, the cows sound
a riled sadness. What heat
lightning rising. Reverberant sky.
I am radioing from myself
to myself. Endless desert
where I thought a drop-dead
winter should be. Some nights this
is all I can do to keep from—. I drink myself into a threat
to sleep off my dress
by morning. What static electricity when we’re still
in the eye of it. Thunder slow-dilating
overhead like a train whistle. The lake swallowing
the thrill of lightning lines.
My only desire a desire to touch
—no one—for a year. Let the storm drag me
bodyless into the hush of long grasses,
fields brushed with sage, wait for someone
more remorseful—to pass through. —I’m leaving
with the perfume rising off my hair, two children
asleep in their nests.
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Eugène Carrière. The Contemplator, 1901. Oil on fabric. The Cleveland Museum of Art.
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Cori A. Winrock’s book, Little Envelope of Earth Conditions, was chosen as Editor’s Choice for the 2018 Alice James Books Prize and is forthcoming. She is the winner of the Boston Review Poetry Prize and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Best New Poets anthology, West Branch, Crazyhorse, Bennington Review, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. Her debut book of poems, This Coalition of Bones, received the Freund Prize for a first collection. Winrock is currently a PhD candidate in the Creative Writing program at the University of Utah where she is a Steffensen Cannon Fellow.