“This is my letter to the World
That never wrote to Me—”
Emily Dickinson
Green hills fold forward in the distance
like an envelope folding a letter
from the earth within it.
Watching from this window
I have some correspondence with her,
dancing white flowers
weaving down the mountain in arabesques,
an unsown patch in bloom at the base
like the mark of a question.
The sun is filling the cracks now;
it is that time of day when the hand
of a mail carrier changes the seal.
The bright orange glow fades behind a silvery crescent
and from the space behind the pane
I glimpse an instant of the corner coming up—
maybe it is some deep breath in the grass
or a laborer sighing, tired with making
the hills over and over.
Imagine what the written words might be—
the hand of the earth, I think,
must be calligraphy,
each letter connecting at a slant,
inky like the creases of the hill.
You might call this beauty,
though I see
one moment curtsied before a window,
the hills all wild with color,
so many shades of green bowing in the
sun-behind-moon-light.
The silhouette darkening
speaks to me more of uncertainty,
like books on the sill
that will never be finished.
A horizon of unbroken bindings,
they hold questions to be asked
infinitely.