Heather Chapman
Unsent Letter as Means of Transmutation
​
Now I have known you an improbable couple
of decades at last we can lie to each other,
or at least beside each other. I picture you:
staring at the ceiling, you pass a Renaissance hand
over your ribs and everything is invention.
In Vienna, now – you’ll recognise the stamp. Imagining
us as the porcelain fountain in the market square,
electric with wishes. I get my cavities filled
with gold, jump to fifty. Remember our first year –
our breath folded and fired like aeroplanes.
Our fourth, silk – we linked pinkies, knuckled
to a stitch. I can’t stop buying things for you:
bottles of air from mountains, bottles of water
from beaches. In twenty more years
I will be a fistful of air and you will be
that fist opening.



