Letter, August 1

I wonder what you are doing today. Isn't each day rather miraculous?
Does it ever make you weak in the knees?
I'm not really sure what all this means, gym class and magazines and marriage...
what can be let go, and what is irreducible?
What is love when you don't feel it, and you just chug obediently
along the track because it's there?
Maybe you are tired of me asking questions. I'm not sure of myself sometimes...
am I actually steady? I seem pretty flighty, to me. I hop up in the middle
of writing you to answer my phone, take pressed flowers out
from between books.
They are delphiniums. I quite like them. It's relieving to find flowers I like;
lately I've been wondering if I like flowers very much at all.
They seem rather illusory and taunting, like the smell of a neighbor's BBQ.

We can't do justice to any of this.
Sometimes I forget to try anyway.
Will you really find me extraordinary and delicious? Will I find you so?
Or will we spend years resolving to make peace with a fluctuating image,
misaligned printing - the cyan, magenta, and yellow bleeding off the edges
where they shouldn't?
Will I be as boorish and perverse with you as I am with myself?
Will you teach me gentleness and manners?
Lord God, help me to be honest. To laugh and mean it.
I'm tired. I've been well fed, and I'm hungry for hunger. Want a little more of the unavoidable acquiescence of fasting.
Jesus, we call on You under our breath, and with our eyes open,
and with fingers on skin. Come, bridegroom.

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