POETRY – When the Envelope Opens, Open

by J.C. Todd

Comasia,

That morning above

Tetova and below the fretted

peaks of the Šar massif, our spirits

topsy-turvy, flushed clear by ozone

and early snow, we looked back

down the cirque to the city, a dollop

in the white-pocked valley held in place

by minarets, and saw how firmly

we are pinned by the bulk of flesh.

What

is the root of such language in me,

etymology so personal

it sprouts from my cells?

A volume, thick,

on a scarred tabletop, acid-orange

light of late afternoon in a mill

town glazing the page. Pittsburgh. It’s me,

reading in the nave, hair held back by

a babushka like I saw in Vogue.

Oxblood loafers, madras skirt, circle

pin. It must be Purgatorio,

Dante’s distinction between the flesh

of earthly attachment and the body

through which absolution is obtained.

The tongue—I remember it!—is flesh,

language is body, images lodged

in the seedbeds of cells, lie dormant

until miraculous bloom.

So what

if I have no Italian and you

have unstable English? Our emails

crosswrite, we read between the lines, pass

over to each other, not on words

but on that snowtop flare of greeting—

friend to friend. Wind tore what you said,

I half-heard. Our speaking—how garbled.

Transported in it, our language—pure.

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J.C. Todd

J. C. Todd’s current poems respond to the dislocations of war. Author of What Space This Body (http://windpub.com/books/WhatSpace.htm), her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Big Bridge, Wild River Review and elsewhere.

Recipient of a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts poetry fellowship, Leeway Foundation awards, and fellowships to US and international artist colonies, she has appeared at poetry festivals in the Baltics, Macedonia and Italy and edited translation features of contemporary Lithuanian and Latvian poems (www.thedrunkenboat.com).

A consultant with the Dodge Poetry Program, Todd teaches at Bryn Mawr College and in the MFA Program at Rosemont.
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ISSN: 1932-362X