another letter

I want to write letters. Dear Michael. Dear Richard. Dear Patti.
I have written the last one already but it is possible to write a thing more than once and sustain the same sort of sense while varying the precise wording each time.

We share approximate cultural milieux although different social circles although the two intersect and often at multiple points but this is not to say that I have made my way into very many of the social circles that I might have set my sights upon for whatever reasons and there are plenty of reasons to want to be a part of this or that although there are also for me a variety of reasons why going here or there terrifies me so I do not leave my room.

Still it is almost like something between us is shared even though it is only I who am cognizant of one particular strand of what must be for you all an overwhelming multiplicity of connections such that they merge into one shining cord of many threads each blinking in a color unknown because it is the color of anonymity but yet a color just without description.

It is only because I understand why and how much I love the composite record of the productions you have assembled for reasons of your own that I understand also why it is I wish to produce in my turn some note or scribble that might somewhere catch an eye or an ear that is trying as mightily as were mine to be caught to be introduced to the possibility of sensical language where previously I had known no way of articulating what it was that I was looking for in the first place. You shared compulsively because it was what you had to do and now I am trying to do something similar in hopes of making that arcane connection outflanking those that were offered to me by my immediate surroundings and leaving them looking as tenuous and irresolute as they actually were back before I could see them myself arrayed around me impoverished and dim.

What a glittering comet in the mind’s sky! As though a sun god ashamed for having blacked out so much of the spectacle of which he was but an inconsequential part at last shuttered his own localized glare revealing infinity modest and splendid in the dark night overhead a million worlds dance with another million worlds and it all carries itself on in raucous silence the drunken grace of stars as steady and long standing as the bristlecone on its haggard rocks four thousand years living and watching us in our frenetic building and casting and welding together as though we could thereby create a vault for the ego momentary and dying always too young.

It is almost as though your voice emanated from Orion’s belt rather than from a low-rent studio in Athens or New York or London. Not to suppose you an infinite body but only insofar as the concrete objects you cast off as you wind your own way toward the horizons of knowledge themselves persist from one meeting to the next all disjoint in time an invitation received ten twenty years after the party but still there are ghosts dancing in living rooms whose only instantiations remain in memories dispersed across handfuls of survivors nodding their heads even now even without noticing the backbeat always insisting upon itself from one speaker cone or another.

How each one miraculous and how each one in its ordinary progression charted a course so strangely familiar that one could not help but ask it to stay on one more turn of the table. I sat up nights with only hooks in my ears holding my gut together. Sleep would find me at dawn teary eyed but calm.