The Bookstore

DEAR TEILHARD,

Imagine being spared a consciousness of insignificant observations, for example: I have not written poetry about cheese, or other things I love, but then some beds are shallow and have no need for dreams, while others offer themselves to the deeper pools of imagination, and everyone I know seems to struggle with reconciliation; there is no sense in it – it is irrational in the best possible way, like drunken forests, and who needs dreams given such deranged landscapes? The earth has broken things off with us – we are suddenly enemy and it feels familiar, and it feels perilous, any attempt to mend. If the earth took on a human voice it would still choose not to speak to us – it sends instead monsoons, tornadoes brutal as betrayal, and I have betrayed, betrayed in silence, the worst kind – and sometimes we are deceived into thinking it is against our better nature to ask forgiveness.

In drunken forests, trees stagger sideways as if trying to their put ears to the ground. Is there music in the thawing permafrost, the stirring viruses? Does it feel like roots breaking inside a frozen mouth, like celebration ushered in on the arm of our own indulgence? Every mistake is a temporality, a symphony – do not forget the ways in which we all participate in demise. I have learned to love words in their moderation – always more behind the scenes, the work of things, the earth in its rightful stirrings. The honeybee is spared a consciousness of insignificant observations – it will record distance, vibration, an entire symposium of color, but even honeybees will abandon their work – fall silent – for the span of a solar eclipse in totality. The other heavenly bodies so rarely show their darker faces here on earth, especially in such a way as we are thrown into someone else’s dream – decidedly not human – a reverie and a sick feeling, the boundaries of sleep smeared by rough lips, the honeybee stunned and covered in pollen.