To Unspecified

I don’t know your name.


Not for any romantic reason, either. It’s just that I have a terrible memory for names, and besides, the music was so loud that I could barely hear you telling me what it was.


So forgive me for not addressing this letter to you personally. I really don’t think you can take offence, seeing as you’re not actually going to read it. And if you did read it, your English (while still being about fifty times better than my Italian) would probably not allow you to understand much of it anyway.


Besides, I don’t expect you can remember my name, either.


I could really have saved a lot of time by writing Dear X, or Dear Pretty Riviera Spectre, but never mind.


I suspect that if this letter gets posted, it will look even colder and paler next to the intensity and passion in some of the others than it does here all by itself on my screen. But I can’t help that.


It also occurs to me that none of this is really a big deal anyway. And not worth writing poems over. But I can’t help overreacting to things either. And the poem is here – although I hardly remember writing it now, and I’m not really sure where on earth it came from – so I feel I might as well let it go where it wants to go. Which, for some reason, seems to be here.


So here you go:

Hang me up like a star
tripping from the spiderweb sky, and
humdrum swaying from side to side.

It’s not that I don’t like you,
or that your eyes and your skin
aren’t soft enough, or look
as though they can’t bear touching.

Float me out to sea –
just hear me out –
float me over tonguing flashfire froth
and black malady,
and don’t let me hunger
the rock-slime up again
or ever come back at all.

It’s not that I don’t like you –
if I could just find
a way to say it –
it’s not anything,
but I can never seem to help
getting absorbed
into the dark.