A high school mash note's stammering lust.
Father and me, shirts and ties, snapshot glare,
and somehow graphed into that air
a young man's foolscap poem when a just,
loose joinery of words was all that mattered.
But then in last night's dream, she (mother, wife,
mash note's love?) tells me a box holding secret life
has been shipped, enclosing sounds I haven't heard:
a wind-harp's warp, words yarding across staves,
fluty sounds ribboned to sad, screechy tunes.
And things: a wishbone, ring, whatever I crave,
the heart-hollows, the cannot-do-withouts, the whens
and whos, the frayed veils between death and here...
I packed this box myself. I packed it full of fear.