Letters He Cannot Send
He drafts and destroys apologies to a family that cannot receive them
I have begun to write to his sister, though I know the letters will never leave this cell.
Dear Madam, I write, and already the collapses under a weight it cannot carry.
There is no honorific in any language equal to the person I have wronged beyond repair.
I cross it out and begin again, and the page fills with the of my beginnings.
If I could give you back one ordinary evening of his life, I would trade all of mine for it.
But the if mocks me, for it names a bargain no power in the world will honour.
, I am learning, is not a feeling one has but a labour one performs and fails.
Each sentence I compose to comfort you would, if you read it, only reopen the wound.
And so I write not to be read but to reckon with what I have refused to reckon with.
Would that I had, but the clause breaks, because there is no verb equal to the undoing.
is a word from the language of commerce, and no coin exists in that currency here.
I cannot repair; I can only , and acknowledgement is a poor and bloodless gift.
Forgive me, I write, and then I strike it out, for I have no right to ask that of you.
To ask forgiveness would be to make my burden lighter at the further expense of yours.
The letter is not because the post cannot carry it but because it has no rightful reader.
He was the only one to whom a true apology was owed, and I have silenced that address forever.
You, his sister, are the wrong recipient, and yet you are the only recipient the world has left.
I keep the drafts in a folder, a graveyard of salutations that could not bear their own dead.
Once I wrote a whole page and found at the end that every line began with the word I.
Even my remorse, it seems, is , forever curving the light back toward its own performer.
So I try again to write a letter in which you, and he, are the only weather.
It is the hardest composition of my life, and I have written books that critics called profound.
The was easy; it asked nothing of me but cleverness, which I had in surplus.
This asks for a self-forgetting I never practised, and the muscle, unused, tears at the first strain.
I do not send the letters, but I do not destroy them either, and that is new.
Once I would have burned them, tidy and absolved; now I let them accuse me from the drawer.
To reckon with a thing, I begin to see, is to let it stay unfinished and refuse to look away.
Tomorrow I will start another draft, and it too will fail, and the failing has become my prayer.