Neon Blue Calligraphy / of Love

Neon Blue Calligraphy
of Love

The concern of the French genre of récit is retrospective - it does not follow the unfolding of events like the novel, but looks back musingly upon them, allowing what has occurred to return in various ways, to the extent they can never be said to be completed at all. It names, thereby, a genre characterised by reflection rather than action, bearing on a single episode, or group of episodes as they present themselves as an occasion for meditation.¹ Lars Iyer

from where writing issues
enfolded in the heart
lines beating like blood vessels
this book of words

I

Do I resist the pull into the past? The way it swirls in me. How much of my heart remains in that vortex of love?

Decades pass silently.
I didn't know where,
or even if
you were alive.

Looking but not searching,
for an essence of what we shared.

How
I,
but words, like billions of capillaries,
this body.
Flow of the aorta.
Systolic.
Writing renews itself for you.

Prodigal.
Like Lazarus.
From beyond, risen, returned.
Kaddish to The Rite of Spring,
a funerary dirge becomes a blossoming landscape of love.
Which I barely recognize, our aged selves.

Where did you go?

And where are you now?

The neon blue calligraphy of the skies, where the plane was swallowed, where you went.

II

When he came out of the past, I wasn't sure it was him. The elegance of his language, that lexicon, I knew it had to be. Always I had difficulty putting him to his words, the latter an outflow of the former but the clarity of his intelligence, how it definitively appeared, neatly without difficulty, on the page.

The elegant calligraphy of a mind borne through the heart.

III

Only from where it is deep, searing,
vulnerability of the self.

Only if my writing pours out,
the blue blood of veins.

IV

I am your lover;
I write as a woman who loves you.

Who speaks to you in writing.

I surrender to you in the flow of the text.