Letter to my Lover

Love,

I never made it to my spiritual vagina. I was
En route Saturday afternoon, the mercurial
engine of my blue Toyota Camry rattling down
The country highway arteries of autumnal

Illinois on a full tank of gas—its owner still
Half-sleep, wizened from work-week and wear
On the soul, harnessing the plastic steer like a
Button or a globe in front of him, two packs of

Smokes and a Venti coffee stowed in the passenger’s
Throne where once you sat next to me just three
Saturday’s before we drove into the sun that blissful
Afternoon I dumped my heart out for you like a

Carafe of memories for you to sip on and from which
You drank (can still intensely feel the curve
And syllables and alphabetical shapes your lips made
Over the faucet of my heart from that day)

Your Copper—the tangible token—a solidified
Tear licked from the upsidedown
Ocean of your heart stashed in my front right pocket
The copper, culled from your own northern

Superior spiritual nest, the pulsating eternal token
A green on-line ajar-eyelid keyhole to
The mysterious joy of my beloveds’ heart—an introit
To the conversation of lips and longings the

Tango of universal souls separate yet solidified. My
Last sojourn to Matheisson Grace had foundered
Outside the town of Lacon with the mechanical organs
Of my vehicle foundering like the transient

Interior orbs of the human body, leaving me stranded
Out of reach from my wooded creative uterus—
And your smile (always with me) As I drove,
Wending my vehicle over dips and valleys

The weather was pushing sixty, yet overcast
Beautiful gray continents of clouds
Cobbled the atmosphere in a ceiling like
British Tea occluded even a treacle of orange light—

There was the woods between the worlds and there
Was my car and there was a desolate road
Sliced between the skeletal brown brush
Strokes of the trees I followed inexplicably the

Wounded arm of the Illinois river to my right
abandoned, my orientation guided now by
the navigating tug and reel of the atlas inside
My chest, the atlas that pulls me into long drives

In autumn madly chasing, madly smoking, madly
Frisking my soul for meaning dashing after
The Last ashy dregs of sun spilling out on the
Earth in a blister of gold and tears.

Oh love, I was lost yet I was driving, content
In a zone out dream state, not giving a
Fuck about the discourse of my sojourn, visually
Enamored by the sight of a sunken

Red brow barn slouched and lonely, fields
Clipped yet a two-day harvested no shave
Gruff semblance connoted to the land—following
In love with the sight of a two story country house

Swallowed on all sides by land and thick sky—
I drove, as fast as I could, smoking
Lost, past a hamlet, into the swerves of
Hills and inclines and steady slopes when

I noticed a vehicle tailing my rear bumper—
The vehicle blue, reminding me of the
Car you drove around MN-St.Paul last august
The night you tottered and balanced with

The acrobatic finesse of an angel tottered
Sedate on my lap before we cruised home,
Lost in the syncopated chimes of Depeche mode my
Fingers lost in the veil of your hair not wanting

To let go of creature situated next to me. That car was the same
Blue as the one you were ferrying that night
August last, behind me as I was lost, and I thought it was indeed
You in the vehicle for a moment

The editions of Rumi and Leaves of Grass both
Tucked in my back dashboard— both
Editions pregnant with fallen leaves from the
Picnic table the morning after you left

Finding the expired kisses of cigarette butts, creases of our bodies
Still imbedded in the mattress of earth from
That day. I let the vehicle pass me and it gunned ahead

Myself, turning on a road I had never ventured down
Before, Myself still lost in the gray autumnal
Overcoat of the afternoon amidst barns and silos

And Trees pregnant with fairy tales, driving a
Different route then the vehicle I thought
Contained your smile—only to find that vehicle,
(speeding) behind me once again, as if it had chosen

Me, as If the vehicle were beacon leading the
Front of my car into nocturnal vistas
A dalliance of dreams, the rich lathered soil of night
Fused in front of me past shires and dirt roads

As I followed only to find it shooting ahead, swerving
Into a large house with a fence and yard
(front newly refurbished) a bouquet of thicket and
woods between the worlds on all sides

I knew as I past it that I had seen this house before
That I had lived in the house once perhaps
Before—for it was the house from the dream we
Shared—at least the front of it matched my

Dream from earlier in the week and the vehicle I had allowed
To navigate pulled into the driveway and waited
A white arm extending from the drivers side—waited
For me to pull into my dream world and

Discern the inside of what it was I had driven so long to find.