Souvenir
our piecemeal world. life stitched together from unravelling. the stone pulled from the bed of the river. polished by forgetting. wool or pelt a diminishing. what warms us? remember how the cat hates its coat rubbed against the grain? that was in my last letter. it may have been removed. I think of him often. the feathers loose on his lips. we scour foreign language for the right way to say I’m not coming back or at least all the maps are blue. all blue with grid and legend. a dozen compass roses. posters from all the films missed while away. pulled from rubbish. reframed in a world that has moved. do you know the night sky? which one? on the boat the change happened so gradually. we didn’t recognise unfamiliarity until that first night. looking up I realised constellations. the only things I’d brought along. missing. all hard lines and angles in the backs of my eyes like instinct. shadows clustered in warm dark around them.
Michael McLane is the author of the chapbooks Trace Elements and Fume. He is an editor with both Dark Mountain and Sugar House Review and was a founding editor of saltfront. He currently lives in Martinborough, Aotearoa/New Zealand and recently completed a Ph.D. at the International Institute for Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington.
Read Michael McLane’s Letter to America, also appearing in Terrain.org.
Header photo by Cornell J, courtesy Shutterstock.
