Dearest,

Other voices keep getting in the way. Believe me when I say, not everything spills so gently into another with happenstance making sense of mistakes. I want to tell you of how, when I awake, I cannot reposition my body to gaze upon the stars that were left. How light splinters through the blinds. How sun. How blue. And when writing, now, when holding, I am trying to pull that memory sticky thing out from a patchwork flash. It seems improbable that we are all so unaware of the forging we undergo, those shapes cast, dappled out with mallet. Notice now. Notice how I am trying to bring a place to this, but I only have position to give you—repose, skeletal. I am making the second steel of a railway with the ceiling. Crescent with hand and toes. My dick tugs at my pubic hairs. My shirt twisted. Every time I stir, a cat descends the ladder and exhales his rank breath into my nostrils.

I should admit to a strange longing for the confessional, the architecture of absolution. The whirring kick of a prayer gurgling out. It's a torsion. A torque that pushes a bone back to joint. The holler of my mother's scream down the hospital hall. Patterns across a life inform a body. When I ask my mom what is one thing she knows about me, she says that I'm stubborn. Another word for insisting on self. Or another word for relentless bucking. So long prostrate without horizon. Heaved forward: ring recess, ring release. It has become hard to watch them shadowbox with the limits of their love.

I want to tell you of the time I asked them if they could guess the number of marbles in a jar. I asked because I believe they have a sonar knowledge of the perceptual. Like how space emits sounds so low we can't hear them, lower than a whale's cry. I once wrote that ava's structures roll marbles across the surface of language. It's true. It's true that what I liked most about the telescope was how its dome moves, the mechanisms that rotate the metal hemisphere in red light. And without knowing, I pulled cogs to me—a clock, a waterwheel. A backbend through mulched earth. The way that two things entangled lead me to basketball. A tender sorrow. A patch of jade holding light, treasure. My body holds its language. To be moved without thought or thinking, to be moved like breath. Breath like undoing buttons. Loosening, revealing, a dress that invites and makes private, ruffles flaring. Soft focus. A loping trot.

You need to know what is permitted on the court, permissible bouts of beautiful anger. When I told Justin not to fight, Dalton already burning with rage at the fouls he keeps drawing, rightfully so, a big man taking him to task in the paint, Justin tells me it's basketball, meaning, we are registered differently, and actually, it is all love, and I know this, and I am reminded, gently, to not break the register, reminded, gently, it is available to me.

Balloons caught in the vaulted ceiling, a balloon escaping from a car, cut loose or lost, rising at a gratuitous angle. And dearest, who knew a plant's arrival could be so shaking? Asking myself what to do about the mounting fears, the ways things can be so normal and so disturbed at the same time. My dreams turn metallic, granite and iron infusions, lucid conversations. If I were to say, put a penny in my mouth, if I were to say, hold it pressed to the roof, cradled in my tongue, if I were to say, swallow.

A year ago, Daphne fed us capers pickled from an oracle told to give visionary dreams. It was my first dreamless night. I can't say for certain what the blankness holds, but I can say that I ate them with fear and yearning and I awoke not with emptiness, not with nothing, but with the treat of a release—too much weight for one sleep. Earlier or later, it's hard to tell now, I did have a visionary dream where I slipped into something sacred. A hawk in a tree met my gaze so long to realize it was a hare. Ears tucked. It bit me until I awoke, protector, holding me back from accessing something I was not yet ready to see—the house down the desert road, just beyond the tree. No wind. An enjoined both-ness. It was always myself spilling forward toward this later conclusion. So, when I impress upon my students the importance of close reading, what I really mean is to give care and attention, to learn to read so as to read the self inside-out. To be transformed by a text, to allow it to do so. I write now and write to you to ask, what is it that I am holding onto so tightly?

It was just the other day that I made faces at Ruby, and she ribbed me. Her baby mullet and rectangle teeth. I mime her mother's intonation. We are creased by encounter. The sea foaming over the rocks, the three of us adrift on a deck in shallow sea. love's back against wooden pallet. Joana floating in crisp waters. I entered the house in Maine and threw myself into family. I would gladly make sandwiches to order, fill a cooler with seltzers and beer, be told not to make coffee lest it be too weak for Carol or Karol. We sprawl out for the day on a patch of rocky beach. It's cold now, here, but there too the sun didn't quite warm. I want to be brave in the face of cold water, to fish myself.

But it is always a question of entrance, of how to enter. Which foot might pass first forward across the threshold. Body bowed by arms reaching either side of an island I walk as a long drape. Wood curls. All kinds of remainder. Parenthetical light in the aftermath of a rainbow. Sonic touches. They tell me that each touch is every touch. So, I place my hand on their knee, and it routes through dull ache, sonar, purple blue to dark spills, overlays a sticky sweet warmth, blending emulsion orange, green now, various forms of texture, the sedimentation of body as lived through love. On the shore, embanked now, toes only always cusping the water's edge. It's river water. Fresh minerality. What it might mean to realize there is not a form of letting go. That we all grow more arms. To not live in this state of understanding submersion. Help me position it. When there aren't words there is always touch and when there is neither words nor touch there are radio like frequencies. I am always emitting. Always enunciating in stereo. Buzzing beneath the skin, ecstatic.

It was only the other day I recalled that my perception of pleasure is confectionary. Whipped egg white and honey to nougat. A particular kind of viscosity. Biblical. As if we've touched upon something holy. Not just here, but in this place, a sacred ground. When I lie down, I think of the word dearest. I think of you. Emblazoning here this epistle. I could repeat forever the same thing and they might never hear it. I say, listen harder. I say, turn your ear. Well-worn patterns can be broken if done with human hand. I try to turn the plow, like how they rutter me away from puddles. We see sound, geese lapping at marsh, the technology of bird call. Moonbeams. Stardust.

My project now is one of the most unctuous formations, and if I could attend to anything at any given moment, it would be to the gentle oscillations of wind and time. Constantly turning a corner at a monastery. Cold stone. Damp. When I lie down, there is a perpetual sliding I might dig into lest I go too fast. Someday will be like every day. A white duck on the meadow. A dog loping the gentle curve of the hill. Their movements scoring the inside air, cut ribbons on the table. Believe me when I say, nothing quite holds the cinematic save for projection and all the ways in which we're melding. A deep tongue. Soft eyes. When a gaze is met, it's a shared myopia. The inside of their pocket, a pinky hung from corners. Seldom do we walk without the sounding pace. Gifted ground. If I could pull away, I would see the same thing but farther. Nothing can quite be new here, it is already present, proprioception.

Like when they touched my face and brushed the dried salt, a fine powder, residue of work, of play, that sprinkled the rosy bend over my nose. Earlier, when Justin called, he said he was giving me the shoes for being a good friend, for being kind, and then handed them to me outside the YMCA on Christian Street—limited edition Brooks running shoes, laser printed honeycomb soles, neon pink so pink almost orange, ice blue, the color of their moment, were it to have one—glacial, quiet. At the mention of this coolness that isn't coolness, but the blue that is the imbedded core of something so big and so cold, a color that might be not the cold but the way it holds the sky above it, or the way nothing can be transparent forever, all the way through, and when it grows opaque it resists darkness and insists on blue, at the mention of this, Courtney recalled a film where a woman, after being trapped in a walk-in freezer, becomes desperate for the cold, the enclosures, the enclosed-ness. I want to tell you that I get this, that cold isn't sorrow but can be a mode of wandering into a desire, a way of feeling the body, a way I feel the body that is my language, speaking through showing the paths one carves across the court, what one does when the ball is in your hands, how you might create openings, how you might vision, see.

They always underestimate me on the court. I get it. In three-on-three, I'm the last they choose to guard. Not trying to impose on the space, never trying to impose on the space, leaning back in a chair at the parlor, contemplating leaving after feeling the way your presence shifts gravities around you, shuffling chairs, jackets moving, inching further and further from how I am new here and how I am and might always be an abrasion on the surface. I am attentive to what and how to be in the space, looking for cues, turning to Brett without speaking, perhaps without him knowing I am turning to him, who, always seeming to know what any given situation might need, tugs the reins, I am watching, remembering my smallness at the friction of this encounter and also remembering I am the sand and also remembering not to place oneself as the center, not to let the way of feeling be a drawing to the core of something so otherwise not of your own.

It is the act of remembering place, humbling what it is that is within me, the same kind of remembering that is floating on the three-point line, watching a reluctant dude draw the short straw and guard me. I'm not the kind of formidable presence he came to be matched with, when we play, ones and twos, a movement lived in, the act of proving oneself worthy, not worthy, but the healthy suspicion that I might disrupt the way that this arc can become a place of holding. Always quiet before speaking, listening softly, looking for the kind of opening to prove oneself worthy, and not that, not the drawing to the core of something so otherwise not of your own, but a longing to be not an appendage but of whatever it is that is happening.

Over pizza, it becomes everything to make the kid smile, to find ways to wrap his gaze around mine, drawing him to surface, watching his phase shift like the moon, all in one moment, crescent to full. I am writing here more for memory, letting words hold a moment I want to keep, than for any other means of receiving. So, when I say that after the first game, their best player looked at me and said, your arms are long as shit, know that I am writing it to have it forever. To be recognized, to have been looked at and seen for the way my wings expand, from hawk to hare to hawk again.

He turns to the young highschooler, liquid and slippery to the rim, impossible to guard, the ball pounded in front of me, pulled over my head, a kid whose future is in basketball, who is there to study, as I once did, find technique in talent, he turns to the young highschooler and tries to show him where to jump to land his dunk. The kid is real quiet, and it's improbable that through his gifts there's a shyness, a fear to leave the ground sooner, to trust his feet and body, to trust that he can. He takes several false starts, he can't bring himself to do it, he can't leave the ground even though moments before he leapt from a different position.

I understand this kind of hesitation, not yet trusting one's body, not knowing whether the ball will reach over and into the hoop. I've worn myself out in the approach as well, and I watch, I watch in wanting, I watch wanting to know what it takes to find the approach that is what opens everything that follows.

As I've told you, I am writing here more for memory, even though Elizabeth Willis says a poem is for, that writing is for, that writing is emergent through the ways it is loosed into the world, I write like how the rake meets the earth and leaves plow lines, combs the soil, and I don't know how not to drag this behind me any longer.

Yours.