And this is the letter

Adeena Karasick
From:   Contemporary Verse 2. Vol. 21 No. 4 (Winnipeg, Spring 1999).

And this is the letter that will not leave.
That I cannot write. This is the letter. The letter
that falls in its carrying. In the killing of
its crushing, its clinging
in its excesses and its masks. This
is the letter which lifts up and
travels from one word to another
grimaces in the torment of its
hardening. In its emptiness. In its own
contamination. This
is the letter buried without madness. Drowning in
its own inexplicable cry. And this is the letter, the
interletter
that does not write. Does not speak but in
nightmares. In the death of its enunciation which
rises, swells in
indefatiguable profusion. Renders its
presence in immediacy and madness. In hysterical
desire.
This letter of letters of doors, thresholds,
capacities, amplitudes, omissions and promises.
Depths and pleasures. That trembles with tension.
Stretched / in its torments of
glyphs, glas gloss / glassary rasp lisps
in its missing . In its
hiddeness and limits. In scattered separations
mocks in anxiety. In foreigness and deception
swells
into the letter this letter
sung in its horror, anger, agon. Suffers
in substitution, redistribution and bears the
unbearable, irrepressibly posited in
hunger and withdrawal. In staggered familiarity,
desire and exchange;
the letter of the letter that witnesses
and withstands its usage.

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Adeena Karasick's works copyright © to the author.