Dear Jack,

I’ve decided to write these letters to you because I feel like it’s a good way to be honest with myself and I want to speak candidly about poetry and my life. In one of your letters to Lorca, you said ‘the dead are very patient’, which feels sort of true to me but I don’t really know now. You don’t seem very patient in death. All I have are these poems and some delicate ideas about you and the ghost light of your voice that I hear through the internet. I don’t know if you know what the internet is, it’s like this invisible net that hangs over the world and sends information to people, but maybe you do know something about that… My main intention for writing these letters is to talk to you about poetry and what it is, how it works and what it does to the soul. The poet Ariana Reines says that ‘poetry breaks up some of the plaque that sits on the heart’, and I think that’s true, and I believe that poetry is close to prayer, close to the nexus of mystery and faith. I want to know more about that, I guess. 
When I started this project I had the intention of ‘translating’ your poems, like you did with Lorca, but I don’t know if that feels right anymore. I think I’m going to write poems and listen to your spirit talk, does that make sense? I want to know more about celestial mechanics and angel business. I guess I’m just here whispering my secrets to you, and yeah I do think the wind is on another level, pushing little images around my backyard. 
Ok, cool, then let’s boil this first part down to the image. What did you mean when you said you’d like to ‘make poems out of real objects’? I think you’re right about it, the imagination pictures the real, Duncan called his imaginative space a meadow, I like to call it autumn. My autumn self writes my poems. Mallarmé called it the ‘flower absent from all bouquets’, the flower held in the mind. I like that, I think it’s real. ‘The poem is a collage of the real’, you said. Ok, so I’m going to try to put real living images in my poems.

Love,

Hunter

***

the light itself is vital, a candle in the window
of your forehead open and tangled in the bright
lace of your eyes, I want to communicate

there’s this grief that striates the cold lawn
a hand locked in a gesture of receiving, windows
spitting visions back through me and again

I saw the moon glide back to you across a carpet
of blue night, I saw my youth, flattened and dim
a revolving mirror in the middle distance

***

Dear Jack,

I like what gets left out of the sentence. I like the hollow lines and the gaps where light comes through. I like your poems because they feel honest to me. If the lyric is a haunted mode, then to write lyric poetry is to hold a seance in the mind, right? 
The I is the vessel, it takes on all of that light, variegated, possible. I think people recognize it in my voice sometimes. I’m lonely here, but the lights flash five times when you enter the room. Is that you Jack? I recognize the cadence, a wet shadow blocking out the moon. I put a forest between us, but that’s not right, that’s language lifting us up above a factory town, smoke ebbing like people’s breath in winter. I guess sometimes I feel like I’m not supposed to be in the room, does that make sense? Did you ever question what they said to you? Do you see the silver light at the edge of the moment too?

Love,

Hunter

***

put the wasp in the poem
put the idea of it
in the poem and drive

the hills look like suns drowning
in a blackout of air
go back now

go back to it
put yourself into the bright
determining light

of the singular
put the room back together
inside the soft nest of your mind

and drive, dangerously
past the many versions
of yourself lifted

above a quiet lawn drinking
sunlight and precision
I would like to go home now

I would like to go home

***

Hi Jack,

I blacked out. And all of that empty space was filled with hands gesturing towards the received, the given. Sometimes when I write a poem time becomes less of a room and more of a consequence of many moving shafts of light converging on a central feeling. Does that make sense? I mean I lose myself. So I’ve been going to the woods lately to find poems. I find them beneath mushrooms and leaves, the shadow of a hawk, all of the water in the pond lit by the moment’s perpetual music. I’m thinking about how I love these things, I don’t want to take them with me. I want them to stay there, where they belong at the edges of my thinking pattern shattering into bright pieces of lack. So yes, I want to be in the space ‘where autobiography shattered but did not quite destroy the surface.’ I’m reticent about these things because I’m concerned, and I have to be honest with myself. I’m scared. You said ‘Loneliness is necessary for pure poetry,’ and that makes sense to me, poetry can be belligerent in the face of love. But love can also knit the fabric of one’s locality back together so to speak, and that is something to praise in this life. Ok, so then what I’m trying to get at is; where does the heart fit into all of this? Jack, your heart beats wildly in your poems, and I can feel it vibrating in the discrete shell of your books, which I leave on my nightstand and see before I fall asleep. 

For a long time, I tried to remove emotion from my poems in an act of psychic/aesthetic immolation. Because I was scared of what it all meant, where my heart was going. I thought I could write these cool poems that turned away from myself and looked outside. But in doing this, I realized I could no longer look out or in, I was in a constant state of opacity, gliding along the walls of the room looking for something to hold onto. I began to realize that the heart is necessary for pure poetry. That the heart is a column in the middle of the sun, absorbing all of that light and ringing like true morning. I’m not ambivalent about this. I’m not into apathy. I think this is important and there’s something to be said here about love. You said ‘When you are in love there is no real problem,’ and honestly, I don’t know if that’s true, but the poems I write from the heart always feel the most important. I don’t know if it’s because they have real world analogues, or that they have an ‘audience’, as you put it; but I know that they matter because they exist at the edge of the truth, catching waves of the real. And this is, I think, what it’s all about. This is the real, this is the start of it.

Love,

Hunter