You are to return,
and take this letter with you.
Its words, penned behind characters
winged like small birds locked
in a ricepaper cage,
you alone have the keys to open,
let the words go free.
Yours the choice: to snare
the escaping words from the air,
cradle them in your slender fingers
--bars that long have held my heart--
kiss and stroke
their paper-feathered lightness:
or cast them off and out,
let them drift on the breeze,
subjects not of your heart or mine,
but of their whims and currents.
Or let them sink in the river
that floats you home,
that holds our secrets in its tea-green darkness,
that bears you from me, from these words,
and from new words that in days to come
will follow forth to seek you
in the sunset colors of the river you ride.
Beyond this room
where the brushstrokes glide,
releasing this dreamt-of flow of words,
my wife sings in the orchard
and my sons dance in each other's arms,
knowing themselves enclosed and safe,
the song their reality,
the dance joining them to earth.
Here, in this room,
is a special truth, of lamplight
and inkblock, rice paper and brushes,
the things that remain
when your body departs,
waving your soul before it
in protection and memory,
forcing me backward toward my duty,
forcing you forward toward a man
whose heart is wholly yours.
There, beyond this room,
is the truth of distance,
the truth of worlds:
of you and a great winding river,
carrying you to battle your own current,
fighting toward a dark sea.
Octavia came to me this morning bearing fruit
from the orchards: sweet pears and persimmons,
figs thick with the scent of earth
--for our trees and vines are overflowing now--
and sat near me while I ate, her look hard to divine.
Could she know that even now you are in the fruit,
that the taste of figs is the taste of your tongue
crossing mine by night, long ago but remembered,
at dawn, that the scent of orchards swept
by the wind off the Tiber before the morning rain
is your sweet musk, and that I cleave
to this orchard, to this house,
even to Octavia, because all things are you
and you are in all things?
I have grown old, my love, sitting here
by my wife's orchards, sending my dreams
outward toward you over the sea.
You would not know me now.
I am going gray and too often I feel
the morning mist seep into my muscles.
The figs revolt my stomach, the persimmons erupt my bowels,
but I cannot tell Octavia. I drink too much.
I fear that if I cross the seas again
as you have bid me a hundred times,
come to you again, you will see me
and cry out to think I am a ghost,
Julius Caesar, returned.
I could not endure that.
We are draped in our ghosts, love,
we wear them like tatty gowns.
When they blow aside, lifted by the winds
that drive us, we are exposed,
our bared private flesh, held out to aging
and the scorn we have engendered
in two worlds at once.
We are damaged goods, love: tired rags
that have lost their shape and color, hanging
on dressmaker's forms in separate rooms.
We have learned everything except how to dress our lives.
Octavia, Caesar, a hundred camp followers,
hang from us in disarray. Their smells overwhelm
even the redolence of this orchard,
even the memory of your scent.
You are the fruit, at last, my love.
Musk and roses, the taste of persimmons
on your tongue, your sweetened breath against my ear
in your cry of passion released.
That first night long ago, on the barge,
then there was no Caesar, no Octavia,
no bought and paid for love,
only the motion of the Nile
and the motion of your hips
as you drank me into you.
In the morning we stood on the deck and you laughed
at the pair of hippos copulating on the riverbank.
"They are vile to everyone but themselves," you said,
and held my arm. And so they were, and so we are become.
I will come to you again, with this letter,
on the next tide, and let the river itself beware.