The Pleasures of the Alphabet

I

It is mid-August, and the dust and fire smoke give way to rain, not for an afternoon, but for two long and otherworldly weeks: verdant, English, biblical.

Out through the wide double doors the rains lay the ash leaves flat, the road is black, and clouds rise from the ragged folds of mountainsides.

Even in the mountains the world sums to flat, fields and fences average out, the scrawl of rocks, the phone lines’ gentle catenary.

In all of this a woman laughs on her phone, standing under a juniper, in the lines of rain.

II

Letters grow like fruit, pendant and discrete, and words form without syntax, just color or scent without context.

When vowels fall, they drop quick, striking the ground and rolling among the incomprehensible blades of grass. Still, sense remains, up in the branches.

When consonants split, the whole tree shakes, and creaks, and shoots curt clicks, the old wood checks and the new wood breaks. And then wind uncreates.

In the stream beside the tree the letters rattle and collect. Languages come to be and pass, and there is something else, something too small to see:

The dappled shadows move, signs coalesce and disperse, a broken day, delayed eternity, fragile gestalt, hidden idea-of, dark shuttling

manifold forms—though thrown by letters they almost seem alive, and so believe themselves the cause of whole unfallen sentences.

III

The streetlight holds a world of snow, whole genus of pictographic script, and though each flake participates in soundlessness somehow the gist comes clear.

IV

Vines on the porch swell at the bud scar. A ladybug crawling on the glass. The pertinence of pleasing things does not last.

In the dry garden new snow creates a page under old writing.