A Letter
Anonymous
Have you ever gotten a letter
from who you love
but they’re not where
your arms can reach them?
The letter fills in,
is words on a page
you read over and over and over.
They lose all meaning,
become ciphers;
and you know that reading
and rereading and rereading
is delusion.
The letter, the letters,
the words, are not flesh,
as a picture is not flesh.
The letters, the picture, not flesh
are a torture,
a God you pray to
who never answers,
never does you any good.
June 4, 2020
Comment, mine: The delusion isn’t that only one person will do: it’s the sad realization that a letter is any kind of substitute for the real thing, actual presence—not necessarily sexual but of course could include it. It’s not even second best because compared to living adjacency, it’s in a way first worst, an acute reminder of what’s not there, a cruel tease. An enactment of that sad tease reminding us of what’s not there is kissing the letter or picture or crushing them to one’s heart, maybe salting them with tears. Plus, the realization of absence acutely heightens the feeling and meaning of love. It doesn’t in any way weaken it.
R:
"Not flesh" sounded sexual to me. And a bit cold. Why would the words lose meaning? The response is so far from my own that I cannot but hear it as disgruntled at not getting what is for the writer the only way he can love and feel loved---through physical contact. And I seem to recall people reading letters over and over as if each reading was a communion. and the song,
I'm gonna sit right down and write myself a letter
and make-believe it came from you, etc
That's not me either but I'm sympathetic to it.
Me:
When someone misses a person, the person isn’t there. Flesh seems a warm and immediate way to designate what’s missed. Sure, it connotes sex, and how is sex not part of what’s missed with one’s beloved? But flesh effectively goes to the totality of physical presence or what I call physical adjacency.
That includes sex but isn’t reducible to sex; nor is sex a necessary or sufficient condition for flesh as physical presence. You might be thought to tilt away from the point or loading your point by your words “physical contact,” which imply sexual exchange. But my point is that flesh in the context of this poem signifies, points to, the totality of physical presence.
In the poem, the letters are read. They fill in, as the words of the poem say. But then they are read over and over because one wants more than to be filled in. One wants the person; and letters are then reread in the impossible quest for more and reread and so on till one knows there can be no more. There finally is only absence, nothing that can fill in the absence of presence but presence itself. And that’s the rub. Of course then the re-re-reader is, using your word, “disgruntled.”
In the song, the guy doesn’t have the girl. So he’s going to write himself a letter to try to pretend that he does have her and that she’s writing lovingly to him just as she used to. It’s actually pathetic, even as the song’s just a popular ditty. But in the poem the guy has the girl but she’s away from him. He wants what he can have but for her being away, hence the rejection of letters as any kind of stand in. If the guy in the song got back the girl, then he’d rather have her than her letters.
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