Brad Leithauser
The Mail from Anywhere
Mail from pretty much anywhere was nearly
A month in crossing the sea and climbing that island's
Burning hillside. Each day, the heat rose early
And the noon hours called only for a can
Of beer, a cot, and the expunging silence
Of an electric fan.
The ocean was the blue the sun brought forcibly
To whiteness and the hills a blackened green
Forced white as well. At first you couldn't see
A thing when you groped your way indoors, but soon
Out of the darkness it tumbled, the old scene—
Chest, table, folding lawn
Chair, hanging calendar, pint-size fridge, sink—
And every stray detail seen to and pieced
Together, including even that runaway blink
Of iridescent green on the backs of the brown
Lizards that prowled the walls. (They were supposed
Keep the insects down.)
Sunsets were jarring, uncontrolled events,
The monstrously expansive greenery
Revealed at last as veined with blood. But once
The sun was gone, sometimes, a sourceless flush
Would follow, like no other, and the sea,
Internally awash
With light, turn weightless, while down the beach a masked
Figure might trudge ashore from out a cloud . . .
The air would cool, grow warmly rich with massed
Exploratory scents, and the thoroughfare
Of the Milky Way unroll like an open road,
As happens only where
All cities lie well under the horizon,
And on such evenings, when the wind was flat,
The bay unruffled, and no moon yet risen,
The heavens would double—stars above, below . . .
That those glints were but the ghosts of fires lit
Millennia ago,
Such being the time light takes to traverse the sky,
Seems an almost too familiar notion, not
To be doubted—and not to be believed. For try
As we may, and must, the numbers our minds uncover
Will never fit inside our heads. And yet,
When morning would deliver
Another sort of light—that of a sky-
Blue envelope—here was a gap that could
Be taken in and understood:
to know,
As the heat-loosened glue gave easily
To your blunt fingers, A few weeks ago,
Someone was thinking of me.
Brad Leithauser, The Oldest Word for Dawn: New and Selected Poems, Alfred A. Knopf, 2013.