A Letter to Richard

When you said you had glimpsed me drunk (the superego sound asleep), did you think I would take you literally and call that truth a lie? Have you seen me dance? I dance. Have you heard me sing? I sing. My outbursts of joy are legendary in the lowlands. I slobber in ecstasy at open flowers, part the parturient furrow with a firm, farmerly finger. All this joy you have been privy to only in imagination, where all ecstasy roots.

At the nineteenth question I became invisible, the upright letter for ego shimmering into a hazy A and dissipating into a pearly fog on the chrome back of a circular mirror, or hissing from the blabbing pavement under the shuffle of bootsoles, or peering down from the eye-like black spot on the wing of a moth alight for an instant on the mimosa, or floating from the sex of a pistil shaken by the wind into the still air, or escaping into the blood on a once-sterile bandage over a now invisible wound which had wanted desperately to be a tea rose scenting milady's night table on a warm April evening suffused with gentle incandescence.

Any intoxication you saw was a frenzy of words, not a discombobulation of the senses, a conspiracy breathed between dreams and me rather than the shimmering leaves of elms in October when all but the last leaves had reddened into dusk, and heaped arboreal detritus waiting to turn into smoke resembles the intricately patterned golden helmets of the antediluvian gods, each helmet shaped of hardest iron and leafed with thinnest gold, the earth's body armor over a layer of dark dirt that seems thick to you because you are so close to it, but which is, on the scale of the planet, as tissue-like as hammered foil, and on the scale of the universe utterly, utterly invisible.

And, looking in the other direction, we both see that the helmets are just piles of fallen leaves, the dead grass just grass, the dirt plain dirt fecund with animalculi. For it is only ideas that turn objects into metaphors, that insist on interpretation (validating the idea of ideas) and hunger after meaning. The leaves meanwhile shimmer and fall, and the trees whether naked or needled in green float in November shadows on the long road to June.

Thomas David Lisk, Raleigh, NC, serves as the Head of the Department of English at North Carolina State University. His fiction, poetry and essays have appeared in "many little magazines and newspapers." A collection of his poems, A Short Hisyory of Pens Since the French Revolution, was published by Apalachee Press