Ditch, July 29.
Dear —
I have no advice. This place makes me itch. Underground, so many rodents, their fine white bones honed to points. The crush of them inside their miniscule pelts. What can I tell you? You who change into another you and then into another, across the page, and then back into you again. The same thing happens to me, to I! The plant in the foreground leaks a white sap. It will make your eyes shine before it kills you. It keeps the birds off the monarchs, though. Do you remember walking down Court Street, leaking milk? We are done with all that, now. I finished the first letter I started but only because I ran out of space. I can’t remember how it ended. Red metal flag raised up. While I was looking elsewhere, what was stowed in the cache disappeared. Thusly, we move around in time.
Love —
ξ
Ditch, August 1.
Dear —
Mornings here, objects keep to their shapes. This is not the case at night: everything shaking out of itself, and all of that pressing-against to be done. Quell vs. ignite. You know the conundrum. Last night, behind cloud cover, the Aquariids raked relentlessly across what we call atmosphere. And this morning, all the glories on the vine look up, dilate their sweet little glory holes. In the letter, the woman tells the man she locates her center in a precise square centimeter, lets the Atlantic smash it around for a stretch of hours each day. This ditch is like a tidepool. I am talking about intertidal zonation! Echinoderms! Chicory! I am building a house here; did I tell you? What you see depends on which way you are facing.
Love —
ξ
Ditch, August 18.
Dear —
Ditch performs August: untidy, unlabeled herbarium. No stems of pressed plants in delicate x formation here, no fluted lettering but this same embarrassing ardor: in every summer’s envelope, an accidental love letter. I do not mean anything by it, except what I mean by it. O, swoony summer days, o, bodies just waking from afternoon slumber, o, blooms, o, napes, and all of that. The rains turn ditch to fen, and I tug up the mud blanket. I am trying to be honest: an imperfect art. I have poison ivy under my chin, along my ribs. They have cut the summer oats already; they have yet to stripe the new tar; there was a dead finch by the mailbox this morning, which our youngest girl insisted was sleeping. Open beak, open wings. I contemplate the many meanings of enough. I fear I have not said what I mean, here, while saying what I do not. Clouds pile up in the evenings, stall, electrify, move on.
Love —
ξ
Ditch, August 19
Dear —
We left so fast I stashed the city in my cheek for later: wet red streets on a charm bracelet and the train around my wrist. City in a city-dome, city at the end of each road that leads from here. A girl I was leans in a doorway. Here, no intersecting gaze network: I look a long way across the field. I am all banged up. My neighbor here in conversation with her own boxed bees. My ditches here in conversation with my humid sprawl therein, where I pull the city out to look at, one link at a time.
Love —
ξ
Ditch, August 23
Dear —
For your birthday twenty years ago, I built a small red bird. Brown paper, masking tape, wheat paste, oil. In May, I asked your favorite bird because I thought I would make another, for today. But you said red-tailed hawk! That seemed daunting, detailed. How to make it hang? How to build the feet? So, I thought to make a sparrow: bright of eye, blunt-beaked commoner. I imagined it standing in your palm. I bought wheat paste. I kept an eye on the feeder. The way they throw their wings back when they land began to seem impossible. Plus, you already have a sparrow. So, I bent my attention to wrens. The upturned tail feather, the slender beak. The vigorous dust-bathing. In July, a woman here said they habitually fly around puncturing other birds’ eggs, stealing nests. Don’t put a perch on your birdhouse, she said. Cute, but the wrens will stand there to spear the baby sparrows, throw them out. Barbaric. (And aren’t we all? But still.) This morning, stretching, stepping from ditch to road, I saw a goldfinch swimming breaststroke across the yard. So, I found the yellow oil and tore the paper into strips. And I have built a small body! It is the body of a bird. But it does not seem to be alive. This is puzzling. Maybe once I paint the eye? And then, it occurs to me: the bird is beside the point. It is not the bird itself, the bird-shape. The point is, be in conversation with that which animates the bird. But you know that already. I take the longest time to understand the simplest things.
Love —
ξ
Zoë Ryder White’s poems have appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Salamander, Thrush, Hobart, Sixth Finch, and Threepenny Review, among others. Her chapbook, HYPERSPACE, was the editors’ choice pick for the Verse Tomaž Šalamun Prize in 2020 and is available from Factory Hollow Press. She co-authored a chapbook, A Study in Spring, with Nicole Callihan. Elsewhere, their most recent collaboration, won the Sixth Finch chapbook competition in 2019. A former elementary school teacher, she edits books for educators about the craft of teaching.