I drive around in my small, old Honda Civic
and play music that reminds me of driving
the same car when it was new but no larger.
The Civic held four people, but now, with the car seat
and its five-point safety harness, it holds three.
There are Goldfish crackers ground into the floor mats.
My husband is the bassist in a local bar band.
They play classic rock covers, and though my husband
hates classic rock, he loves his powder-blue bass.
He loves playing in a band. He loves when Frank,
the owner of the bar, gets drunk and tells the band
how much he loves them. They have a monthly gig.
He makes fifty dollars a night when he plays 622.
There are things that are broken beyond repair,
but my marriage isn’t one of them.
I am not telling you any of this.
Everything I am telling you is in that letter.
I will not tell you about the fact that I thought
praying mantises were an endangered species
when I was a kid. That was in the seventies.
If I think too much about my childhood,
I will feel too old to write you a letter.
The Internet tells me that this is a long-standing
urban legend; killing a praying mantis was never
illegal or subject to a fine. The origin of the myth
is unknown. Mantises are beneficial to gardens they live in.
Here it seems to make sense to evoke Eden,
but I won’t. My son loves praying mantises.
He goes outside each night after dinner to look for guys,
and finds them tucked into the spiky barberry bushes.
I will not write you about my son, and if I mention
Eden, it would be to tell you that there’s no such thing.
That you are not the talking snake and I am not
the woman without clothes who offers and offers.
The apple has no knowledge to give us. Our cosmogony
is unclear. This is not a love note, or a prayer,
or a field equation. I hold my cards close to the vest.
You send me a picture of a tattoo you’d like to get
of a compass, and the road unravels in front of my Civic
like a spool of thread. We are a gravitational singularity,
a theory that implicates epistemology, but I am not
rigorous enough in my approach to uncover anything.
You write me a letter.
I write you a letter back.
We go on like this for some time.