THE LETTER THAT WAS NEVER SENT:
For many years
he wrote the same letter.
He will buy white paper
every few days
and begin again and again
Til sunrise would write
and then burned what he'd done
madman.
From GOYA
I remember the first letter he ever wrote meThe first time we had been apart since I knew he loved meCold and sterile -- I didn't understand -- I expected passionHe told my mother he did not know how to write me
"Write what you would say if she were here," she told himThe second letter was betterSo full of passion I cut my trip shortAnd went home to him.
Cartas de invierno - Is that letters from hell? That poor madman!
Bill Charlebois You're only given a little spark of madness. You mustn't lose it. - Robin Williams
That is so romantic, Aunt Bobby!
Bill -- "Cartas de invierno" means "Winter letters". "Letters from Hell" would be "Cartas de infierno" -- Verdad, Goya?
That's so funny! It shows how easy it is to get mixed up when speaking a foreign language. A friend of mine lived in Argentina for a while. He and has wife got on a bus, and he said, "Dos para dios." The bus driver had to explain he thinks my friend meant to say, "Dos para diez."
auntbobby: Bill -- "Cartas de invierno" means "Winter letters". "Letters from Hell" would be "Cartas de infierno" -- Verdad, Goya?
Perfecto, winter letters.
Bill, letters from hell, it will be cartas desde el infierno ....
GOYA
Hello Goya and Everyone -
Bill's fun translation got me started and before I know it I was reading letters from hell. Great idea, Goya! And great slip, Bill! Here's the poem:
Letters from Hell
You read them with smoking fingers
and a glass of water at your elbow
to prevent blisters and stink.
Everyone in the house dreams
of meadows and ice-cream
while you sit as though chained to your desk,
reading by hell-light far
into the questionable part of the night.
In the morning you stuff them in the freezer
wrapped in an old towel,
hoping no one wants a frozen waffle
or a tube of orange juice.
Hunger doesn’t interest you now,
nor the dishes in the sink.
Children blowing through the doors
escape your notice at last.
Tonight you will clean up the puddle
of defrosted t.v. dinners and take the letters,
still blazing, from the freezer.
You’ll muffle their brilliance with the ruined towel
and creep past the sleepers
to your study, ducking low
beneath the smoke-alarm.
Dawn will find you still reading,
infernal script branded on each fingertip,
your eyes red as dragon eggs
and your blood simmering,
never more alive.
KateSinging
5 February 2008
Kate, that is too cool. I mean, hot!
Thanks, Bill! And I LOVE your merry little demon. Maybe a writer of letters from hell?
Kate
Burning memories,
words etched forever on white.
To hell with "Dear John!"
Powerful stuff, these "Letters from Hell" -- see what you started, Goya? What a great topic!
This just goes to show how one "letter" (v, f, or otherwise) can leave you feeling cold or hot, or just warm all over.
Perhaps it lives under the furniture,
because it arrives early when the night invades us.
First, I leave it a letter with the rules of the house at the entrance.
Second, I leave it a glass of water by my bed
So that will not suffer thirst as it moves through the rooms.
I leave a bike by the door so that it takes a spin.
I do these things for it so that it will not complicate my dream.
It's my pact with the gosht of silence.
FROM GOYA
Alice Jordan:This just goes to show how one "letter" (v, f, or otherwise) can leave you feeling cold or hot, or just warm all over.
Love that, Alice!
And true, too, isn't it? I'm very pro-v, myself. As a child one of my favorite words was lavender, gleaned from the song, "Lavender's blue, Dilly dilly..." (The other was serendipity which sounds just as magical as it really is.)
Alice's observation makes me think that it might be fun to do a SENSUAL ALPHABET poem - how letters affect the body and the senses.
KateSinging (sighing, swinging, slinking, starring, stimulating, sussurant...)