Letters and Numbers

Letters and Numbers

A poem about what to make of love and self-esteem.

“Wash away my past, oh silver rain,

From my bare-branched trees and

My dirt-smeared roads.

Wash away my troubles and my sins and my leaves

Take the dark in my soul down the gutter with you

And leave me, waiting for snow, all new.”

December 2011

Before I post the poem, I want to make note of the fact that I am listening to a French song. I feel very classy. In French class, we're watching an absolutely wonderful movie called Les Choristes, or "The Choir" in English, about a French juvenile detention center where the new prefect makes the students take an interest in music. Oh, it sounds cheesy, but I promise you, it's amazing. Everyone in my class is hooked.
An excerpt from my journal about the song I'm listening to (which is from the movie- it's called Caresse sur l'ocean): "I felt my soul rising, listening to it, and it played in my head as I walked away. I can't catch it again now, it's gone, like that melody of indigo sunset I heard two summers ago... Never haunting, only lifting, though I can't recall a note..."
All right, enough about music. (Though poetry is only music captured on paper before it can escape.) I wrote this poem about a week or so ago- more than a week, two weeks as of tomorrow. I thought it was true for sure, final, when I wrote it, but every day I call it into question. Are letters and numbers so different, after all? Why does it matter, at any rate?
Here's the poem (at last- I do talk on rather a lot):

Still yet it’s you I see
Reflected in these cold, cold raindrops.
These silvery sheets
That lit up my sky in the December city
But bear down in a haze now
Dancing on the bare branches.

Letters and numbers
Do not go together
Just as light and dark
Always fight with each other
Blue sky and dark earth
They will meet never
And art and science
Are too distant brothers.

Oh, it was poetic
But that was all it was-
The ramblings of a poet.
It was lovely while it lasted
But the leaves are falling now
I cannot love you anymore.

You are the final stubborn leaf
On the black, bare-branched tree of my past
Detach yourself, I beg of you,
No, truly, this
I beg of myself.
That leaf is but your love and yours alone, dear writer
He never had any.

And letters and numbers
Untangle themselves
From their dark and stirring symphonies
To walk down the rainy sidewalk
Wherein is reflected the bright white sky.

I stand and watch the rain
Against our nearly bare earth
It rains in December, you see, before
The world dies and is reborn.
Our earth is nearly bare, but now
The rain must clean it free of leaves
Before that blanket of snow heralds in the new birth.

Wash away my past, oh silver rain,
From my bare-branched trees and
My dirt-smeared roads.
Wash away my troubles and my sins and my leaves
Take the dark in my soul down the gutter with you
And leave me, waiting for snow, all new.

Letters and numbers must take different paths,
you see.
Take yours and leave my light-filled sidewalk to me.

A leaf detaches from a branch
And spirals down to the path of running rain.


Well, tell me what you think! I'll post another poem soon!
-magic*esi