Landis Everson

"What you are struggling with," said the psychologist, "is a continuous song, something like a telephone's tone. Nebulous, noncommittal, unrelenting, pretending to give you messages it can't deliver. Because the body is unattached. It is," he said, "like a valentine sent out cold, beautiful, brittle as tomorrow's deja-vu, but distortedly misaddressed. These pills will help you find yourself somewhere where the lace ends up loose and the paste is still humming all about you.

Valentine, valentine you arrive in a town car with a chauffered envelope, scattered pieces of you enrolled in schoolyards like a recess of paper vanity, litter, old with red-rimmed "loves," red-rhymed lies in lace. The verses come, rising as easily as long-stemmed snakes in bloom where swamps settle down and drowse by dawn, a night of secrets slid out of drawers like knives nesting, a choice of chimes and slums overrun by bejeweled heartbreakers. What a lovely winter, almost skipping February.

Now it's time to play. Nobody says, like they used to, but in my bones the desire overwhelms me. "Write! Make a poem," say the bones. The inlet will come first. It always does. Water calls urgently, "egret." The waterbird that moves elastically over the surface making everything focus soon or late. Now my hand enters. It always does. It gives the bones reason to observe. It makes the egret the finest thing in sight and the water intelligent north of here. Water is genius because it is interconnected. Drop south knows drop north. But the bones will lose their joy if the bird overwhelms the old playground.

How did the valentines age so fast? Most of the names are forgotten. Billy, Billy, Billy, Jill I think strangers sent them out like advertising hoping I'd surrender. But Jill, Jill, Jill and Billy Bill, shared memories aren't easily kept. Secrets wash out of the ocean blank all over. I am sitting on a beach chair somewhere in the middle of the century, pretending I remember a garden of broken banjos and butterflies, old movies. Valentines from Valentino, Notes from Norma. Worms and spiders thrown at waves. Box of my names, shut up.

Put nothing down to distress the reader. No barking dog. No rustle in the place whispers belong or photos of petals near collapse. Erase oranges of confusing taste, a face wrinkled or in pain, a map with waterless rivers or water without a bend, still in darkness. Here, where mystery beyond hope comes too near, make a bright flight of leaves descend, none to smear all our spotless rivers. A map folds and unfolds, does not bunch or wrinkle. Rainbows to last. The First Endlessness of Eden. This was the spot I was to start on, a leg steps out of the lake, a step falters instead into dashes that spread without prints onto the screaming bank.

A tree that grew in the Garden of Eden a tree of innocence called the Tree of Good and Evil. It was harmless as opposites are in balance. It was also tasteless, the taste of innocence before it is betrayed. When God removed the wall he gave the lemon thorns and bitterness because it had no hostility. It is a taste we want most to subdue. It asks to be left alone. We use it with fish and tea. We sugar it. Look out the window. It stands with a donkey’s stance, hoping the day will pass. Its scent through the curtains cuts through mustiness, sharp with sweet blossoms. It hides the smell of new babies.

Defend me. I am not capable. The river sweeps by three minutes at once cleansing me of guilt. But the bear crashes through it and breaches my innocence. He rages and frightens my innocence. The psychologist says, "You are the bear. You are the river. You are the green car crossing the bridge. Defend yourself." But the green car is in a forest I have failed to speak to. The green car was never intended to drive in that forest, not cross a bridge that must not exist in a real dream. Further, the real dream defends itself.

Almost the first reindeer shipped North by boxcar from Lapland but a toy model got there first. A dwarf invented reindeer on his own. He was Santa’s favorite. He hadn't known they already existed. This discouraged dwarf was close to taking his life but Santa showed up encircled by snow. He said, “I will use the real reindeer for my sled always in yoke to your original invention.” That night the gears that turned the Pole stopped and began to turn the other way, so it be so. My love is a toy model waiting for a reindeer to carry me.