swifts  &  s l o w s · a quarterly of crisscrossings

from Letters
Jonathan Minton, Diana Magallon & Jeff Crouch

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Dear reader, you are more than eyes that stare.
You are as serene as the blue on blue
along the coasts of Toulon. La inconnue,
you are like the air and water in this book.
You first arrived as a picture. Someone named it
the drowning girl, but every town has claimed you.

Dear reader, there is no word for a color
until you have learned to create it. The first blue
was a void. It is never used in Homer.
Egyptians used the word eye to describe it.

Dear reader, because you are no longer a stranger,
I will write about teal-colored ducks in their harbors.
I will write about blue enameled lions,
and female saints in their ultramarine linens.
These are yours. They have never been mine.

In my letter, I said that you held me like a blind fish in an alien air.
I was thinking of the difference between penance and pennant.

I can show you our other fictions, our heads hung low, with smoke
rising around us in slender strings, or the image of a swallowtail,

tapered into a green, delicate V. I will say this again, but will guard
against the brighter lie—the copper coin, the child’s trick.

Every star is dying behind its light, but this light still signals
at the lid of the world, where the rooms are darkened,

and every blank wall is a door swinging inward on ancient hinges,
and every promise begins and ends until forgiven or forgotten,

and every silence culls and pulls until our eyes only see
the Os of their sockets, and every mouth says yes and yes,

and everything points elsewhere, and everything is the answer.

If you ignore what is at hand, and write instead
about things of distant value – antique coins,
real jade mistaken for serpentine, green glass,
and enameled spoons locked in their drawers –

you will not see the appearance of clouds
of unusual shape and size, resembling
pine trees. You will not see them
swelling like a sail, or the masts below trembling
in a strange vapor that looks at times spotted
and gray, and at times the purest white.

You will become innocent of any lies,
as if stepping into a story.
You must prove that what is terrible won’t last forever.
You must witness ashes falling on the ships.
There will be a shoaling of the sea, and a harbor
full of voices, a clear bell ringing.

This night will be thicker than ordinary darkness,
but you will make your way to shore
after seeing persons sleeping and mistaken for dead,
their cups and plates spilled across their tables,
the tapping of many fingers on every wall,
their letters refusing to speak of anything else.

Adapted from Pliny the Younger’s letter to Tacitus on the
destruction of Pompei, circa 107 AD, translated by J.B.Firth

Poems by Jonathan Minton. Visuals by Diana Magallón and Jeff Crouch.

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Jonathan Minton lives in central West Virginia, where he is an Associate Professor of English at Glenville State College.  He is the author of the book Technical Notes for Bird Government (Telemetry Press, 2018), and the chapbooks In Gesture (Dyad Press, 2009) and Lost Languages (Long Leaf Press, 1999).  His poetry has appeared in the journals Ecolinguistics, Connotation Press, Asheville Poetry Review, Coconut, E·ratio, Columbia Poetry Review, Reconfigurations, Free Verse, Trillium and elsewhere.  His poetry has also been included in the anthologies Poems for Peace (Dyad Press, 2006), Oh One Arrow (Flim Forum Press, 2007) and Crazed by the Sun (Cyberwit Press, 2008).  He edits the journal Word For/Word and co-curates the Little Kanawha Reading Series.

Diana Magallón says that drawing was her first language.  She is the author of Oxygenation, De l’oiseau et de l’eau, largoscabellosflotantes, Bravísima Reseña and Fábulas Furtivas.  Her works have appeared in E∙ratio, Word for/Word, Slova, Compostxts, Fenamizah, Moria, Sentence, Great Works, Otoliths, The New Postliterate and Shampoo, among others.

Jeff Crouch is alive.  In Texas.