Letters Home

for Emma Willard

• Build your own poem. Click on a colored block to show or hide the content; drag-and-drop the blocks to rearrange them, and the other blocks will adjust.
• To the east, the Berkshires: smudged blue fingerprints on the horizon.
• West-north-west, angle yourself properly,
  orient your shoulderblades flat against the pile of white granite,
  and the light falls perpendicular to your gaze, rose gold and blue.
• Go down the stairs and through the swinging doors.
  Put on someone else's face, someone else's clothes, someone else's words —
  when you leave, are you any realer?
• The pond, the mud, the frogs,
  the abandoned boot, potamogeton,
  fragments of eggshell, all that lies to the south, the other side of the parking lot,
  beyond the pavement.
• Passageways, honeycombed
  beneath us. Secret knowledge, now,
  their navigation, their existence.
• There are first kisses scattered here, like the dandelions behind the chapel.
• The carpet is shabby,
  but the piano is in tune. Can't
  have everything. What do you want?
• Storms come from the world outside our gates, pale lightning
  striking out of the west.
• The gargoyles are kind. They laugh,
  peer around corners, tumble,
  curious, shy, unshocked.
• There's been so much blood here over the years.
  The tiles in the bathrooms are all stained with iron.
  Wrists, uterus —
  a single river splitting and reuniting.
• We're forbidden
  to have flame,
  even the smallest match cupped in our palms.
  Who needs fire
  when there are girls just coming into their power all around?
• Honeysuckle, lilac, clover — the books
  are as sweet as the air.
• We went to the cemetery
  halfway down the mountain to smoke.
  The graves exhaled.
• This is not a mountain,
  but let's pretend.
  Let's pretend we belong here
  at the peak.
• The gate is at a strange angle:
  enter and we are all a-kilter.
  Leave, and the world is skewed.
  Choose which way you face,
  inside or out,
  which strangeness is yours.
• The sapling we planted for her
  is taller now than she ever was,
  than she ever will be.
• The small blazons over the door are blank —
  there's room for me to make my mark.
• Ten years on,
  and my heart still beats to those rhythms.
  There's new anger,
  hundreds of miles separate us,
  but still: this is the kind of love you only get once,
  and that only if you're lucky.
• Even the names of the buildings
  are poetry, iambic pentameter,
  the English heroic line,
  click and tap of the educated palate.
• This is where we learn bitterness:
  hazelnut, Sumatran, grief, failure.
  This is where we learn love.