I read your letter.

Your lines languish
between wide margins. You tell me routine things.
And every cursive swoop’s some kind of play.
A loop turns me as it turns up, swings on. I retrace
an a on the round-about, watch your hand
lift the pen to cross a t.
                                      So neat, your slant.
I remember tramping with you, leaning
into tall ascenders: So much grass on the prairie, wind
at our backs, we stepped over a’s and o’s like river rocks
or geodes; we picked i’s and e’s, efflorescences
of waving wheat or barley. You stabbed the ground
lightly with your stick, poked the air, tapped the paper
dotting i’s.
                  It was all about our lives—past, future. Now,
a half-full page, a shortened paragraph comes up—
so much space before the o’s and x’s! I follow you
into your name, signed for me one last time, I guess.
I start again, page one—suck in blue loops, my tongue alert
inside my cheek.
                            I let you turn me ‘round and ‘round,
a vacuum cord whipping dangerously, finally drawn
into the rubber-funneled hole, the plug end
and its forked prongs nicking my ankles. Or, my lips
suck in too-long spaghetti, and later, red streaks
on my chin. A set of directions
your writing has always been, each line a route
with place names and little pictures of hills and trees,
river crossings that lead me on.
                                                     It has always been
a map to somewhere. Now, a map
to a place no longer there.

by Casey FitzSimons