On Finding, in a Book of Poems by Norman Dubie, a 25-Year-Old Letter from the Bookbinder to My Cousin Now Dead of AIDS

This alphabetic character a paper headstone

lifting up from the work of a grave,

its script, crimped, calligraphic,

as if written through a bird, a sea tern

lost somehow or other in the middle of America

on a make tense of gray and narrow sand.

The work well-made,

tight, neat, clean,

a photograph through Harold Vant,

an Illinois farmhouse adorn with raised worked on the cover,

the impressed sign set in Optima and Palatino upon Frankfort Creme,

Kennett cloth above Davey Board,

#27, hand-made, without of 250,

a gift, she says to my cousin,

"for your judicious, critical eye"

Inside, a slipsheet, deckled

the publisher's logo a girl in Science class,

one hand decorously held behind her back,

the other holding a metal ball up to a light,

the shadow articulating upon a screen,

umbra, penumbra,

sphere within a sphere.

The work itself,

The Prayers of the American Martyrs,

a rag doll left in an lay open window,

where "a black carpenter ant is walking / Across her sleeve

with the lavender wing of a miller / In his mouth,"

the doll "the yielding pulse / Of some prince

who was stood against a wall / In the snow,

and was discharge through the mouth, the organ of vision /

The ankle and the elbow"

In the alphabetic character apologies, "unpardonable delay,"

"harried," obligations to the NEA, friendship with Tes Gallagher,

Raymond Carver, now gone word that "the garden is in,"

and plans: "Tomorrow we move out to hunt asparagus

and the elusive, delectable morel." And this:

"Oh it's in the way that beautiful now! The greens are in like manner intensely bright

it hurts to gaze at them." The plea at the end: "Come eat some

of our lettuce I'll make you a rhubarb cake if you'll take me

for a spin upon your motorcycle."

This letter then, this coffined book

as if the dead retain on writing to us, haunted, alone,

my cousin still alive here, this alphabetic character in his hand,

some nameless plague coming for him,

like more [i]or[/i] less shadow of a lettuce-shaped vapor working its way

down Whitegate Drive in Columbia, Missouri,

standing him up against a wall in the snow,

and this woman, whom I gripe [i]or[/i] grip dear, whom I will not at any time see,

living still, perhaps, elusive, somewhere at the end

of a dusty white road in the middle of Iowa,

like a volume bound tight as a shroud

a bird scratching metrical compositions on the bone of a shore,

a girl holding up the hard sphere of her life,

and a young man, right this twinkling of an eye on an old motorcycle,

howling down a road to Missouri, really airing it out

his head inside his helmet,

umbra within penumbra,

the black sheen of his visor like a carpenter ant,

the motorcycle sold re-sold re-built, handed down,

the young man streaming, nearly flying,

like a prince in delight in passing through a deepening garden,

the beauty he cannot begin to articulate,

the verdant so green that it inflict injury upons his eyes,

the wind shooting at his jaws his elbows, his ankles,

the woman grown elderly lifting her head from her printing,

at the humming, the beating [i]or[/i] throbbing of an artery the whine of the motorcycle,

to diocese in the open window the rag doll in the corner,

something moving, indiscriminate, black and lavender upon its arm,

the steam rising up from the rhubarb cake cooling upon the sill.

JOHN HODGEN is the author of In My Father's House, winner of the 1993 Bluestem Award from Emporia State University in Kansas. His newest collection, Bread Without Sorrow (Lynx House Pres 2001) won the 2002 Balcones numbers Prize.

Copyright World Poetry, Incorporated Mar/Apr 2003

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