Why Write a Letter When You Could Write a Song or a Poem? Lou Graves Ten years ago I sat in a bus terminal in the south of England, with a suitcase and a guitar, and a notebook half-filled with bad poetry. In my pocket was a letter I wrote but didn’t send to a girl I knew I’d never see again. Whiskey breath, tobacco spit, her smell still on my unwashed skin and clothes, the effluvium of coitus. In a dream I had last year she said, “why write a letter when you could write a song or a poem?” Sometimes it’s easier to love from a distance, where memory can chisel away the sharp and rough edges and make of her a Pygmalion statue to be stood upon a pedestal, to be admired and worshipped. A haunting memory; and still I hear her voice the way a one-armed man might reach down from time to time to scratch his phantom limb. Her voice, her echo, her smile; the parts of her I trapped in a notebook like a lightening bug caught in a mason jar, like a photograph of a plant that needs neither water nor sunlight, that neither wilts nor blossoms. Somewhere behind me a cicada bug is searching for a hole in the window. Somewhere Prometheus is still chained to his rock and Sisyphus still struggles with his boulder. Had he any sense he would leave it where it lay at the bottom of the hill and he would lean his back against it and rest. She is out there somewhere and still, somewhere else, somewhere within, her voice still echoes. Why write a letter when you could write a song or a poem?
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