from Letters Inscribed in Snow (VI)

 
 
 

Later you sent me a message I did not entirely understand. I had wished for a spectacular meeting and instead I wondered if I had been speaking to a snow labyrinth. The message relayed an unsolved maze, which you noted as the most notorious problem of winter gardens underground. You summarized the problem like this: “And when they were tired and lay down, they arranged themselves in the very letters.” You mentioned that the problem would be difficult to take by the hand, but practical applications included a pair of new skates. If the solution to a problem can be verified in shining pieces of ice, can it be inscribed in polynomial-winds abated by sun-time? In order to find a solution, one must first locate a book of exponential hands. But your movements disorient my meaning. What is your meaning? You try to overcome the difficulty of unsolved isolation by breaking down the separation between the body of any given season and the more than one-hundred ice halls, according to the way the winds shift. You tell me this is how you define breath.
 
 
 

Laynie Browne is the author of ten collections of poetry and two novels. Her most recent collection of poems, Lost Parkour Ps(alms) is out in two editions, one in English, and another in French, from Presses universitaires de Rouen et du Havré (2014). She is a 2014 Pew Fellow. Forthcoming books include Scorpyn Odes (Kore Press) and P R A C T I C E (SplitLevel Texts).