ON NOT YET OPENING MY PARENTS’ LOVE LETTERS
-
Josephine Dickinson
(U.K.)
The bank opposite spills
golden light. Over
there in the sun the holy
hall and the hill
run down to the river. By
the time I reach
it the air is grey and
dim.
Later I take the packages
to bed with a pair of scissors
from the childhood home.
They are a treasure from
before
childhood,
so carefully wrapped,
every edge closed off, how
am I to cut through
without touching the
treasure inside.
I sit in bed, the womb
space, scissors at my side,
wishing I could phone my
mother.
Slitting the brown shiny
tape round the edges, I prise them open.
There is a tiny bundle
thickly tied in red ribbon,
with a card: It was lovely to talk to you yesterday. Here
are the letters – in no order. Will send
another parcel
by recorded delivery. Lots of love, Liz.
A little bolder, I cut the
top off the other package,
first holding it up
against the lamp to see the light shine
through. Inside is a
jumble of various pieces of paper.
On top is a honey label.
Under it a bookplate, which
I recognize as having
fallen from my copy of a poetry book long ago.
Next morning, the morning
of my cochlear activation, I am cocooned
in my bed while I listen
to the slow moving nasal melody over
the breathy hum of choirs
and the vibrating strings,
a mournful lullaby or an
elegiac hymn, most like
a Bach organ choral
prelude, unadorned,
musing along, moving from
register to register,
with a deep, underpinning
pedal.
And I await sound, a new
sensory impulse,
as the voice in my head is
mourning the old.
The cats cuddle around me,
at my feet,
on the mounds
of green silkiness.
My hair is freshly washed
and almost dry,
gathered in a frizzy bunch,
loose
at the nape of my neck,
thought
to be untangled, to be
made beautiful.
All we experience as sense
is in the past.
How can we reach the
present?
The future exists only as
a construct of the mind.
There is nowhere we can
look and say
‘That is in the future.’
Nowhere at all.
Even the present is past,
if neurologists are correct.
But I can look back at a
time in the past
and a subsequent past,
which is now in the future
to it. Soon, I will look
back and the cochlear switch-on
will be in the future to
this time I am writing in.
Question: if everything I
sense is in the past –
what is it that it is in
the past in relation to?
as I am in the future to
the letters my parents wrote,
so will my reading them be
in the future
to the now of this.
****