Dear FAWN,
It is the barred owl’s evening. Its wings unfold sentences of wind. Its eyes turn to will-o’-the-wisp, unearthly moons above the marsh. Between meadow and marrow a mineral fugue. The woods, their stars-for-eyes tilting, bathe me in whispers. The dark fog is held above the lake. The quiet is a private syntax, a ligature between dying stars. Violets grow strange in the katydids’ rambling equations. All throughout the woods a fragile ecdysis, a splitting in two of time. Aldebaran is a bell in the overstory. This night I dreamed you were lost in the woods. I saw you through an occulum oblique. The world unfurled as a rose with so many suns. You were encrypted from the inside. You were to sing your way out, a hymn for departure. When I woke, you were gone. I am afraid of the past tense. I had an odd sense, while dreaming, that the borders of you were porous. It seemed the air suspended you as it sifted your deer parts. My dearest, my only, the accelerating sea between my fading horizons. I look for you everywhere in the woods. I find words on the page of every leaf. They narrate my undoing, sing me opacities in a voice that is yours and also mine. When I find you someday soon, we’ll read them together under starlight in the grove.
Diminishing into your absence,
Mother