Kaleidoscope Volume 3 Article 5 October 2015 A Letter Would Have Been Fine Melanie Fee University of Kentucky Follow this and additional works at: https://uknowledge.uky.edu/kaleidoscope Part of the Poetry Commons Right click to open a feedback form in a new tab to let us know how this document benefits you. Recommended Citation Fee, Melanie (2004) "A Letter Would Have Been Fine," Kaleidoscope: Vol. 3, Article 5. Available at: https://uknowledge.uky.edu/kaleidoscope/vol3/iss1/5 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the The Office of Undergraduate Research at UKnowledge. It has been accepted for inclusion in Kaleidoscope by an authorized editor of UKnowledge. For more information, please contact [email protected]. AUTHOR Melanie Fee I am about to graduate in May, 2004 with a B.A. in English. This poetry represents the culmination of my work as a Gaines Fellow. Writing over the years has A Letter Would Have become a larger and more legitimate part of my life, and I am very grateful to the Gaines Center for providing a Been Fine venue for this type of creative work. These poems were written in the fall of 2003 over a fairly short period of time, and are part of a larger group of poems, which I hope to work into a book-length collection this summer, perhaps for some type of publication. This group of po- ems is a narrative about loss, abandonment, and how the narrator copes with this to become a stronger, self- aware person. All three of my thesis committee mem- bers, Professors Gurney Norman, Randall Roorda, and Jane Vance, proved to be extremely supportive and en- thusiastic mentors, and their advice was indispensable to me. After graduating, I plan to work on writing and submitting my work to various journals, along with find- ing an MFA program to attend in the fall of 2005. are we in a decline 9.17 she said i see eighteen dangling feet people with your silhouette into too blue water every day sometimes i want to go back don’t you and this is a know lot of gasps and startled breaths what i mean to keep up with i have he tells her that finally Mentor: an idea of you maybe Jane Gentry Vance, Ph.D. just ripping the rest of things have direction Professor, Department of English and in the Honors Program your limbs they are both moving off of my body Melanie Fee’s “A Letter Would Have Been Fine,” a series of short poems, is forward actually one long poem in which the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. This collection both implies a narrative and explores honestly the deep and so that i may stop maybe with their faces shifting feelings of the protagonist (the “I” of the poems), who has been left this perpetual turned holding the shreds of a broken relationship. The narrator, through images that false recognition place us in her skin, makes us feel what she feels, thus compelling us to follow away her into the depths of her pain and, finally, to emerge with her, at the end of the that by the end of the day work, into new coherences in her life, the beginnings of healing. but no she gets a The narrator’s voice in the poems, non-rhetorical and human, convinces us leaves that it comes from a real person. The integrity and strength of this voice, along feeling looking into me with the realness of the character’s suffering and her emergence from it, are the the tall trees remarkable accomplishments of this poet’s work. The strong emotional sus- limp pense it creates is akin to that evoked by a good short story. do i dare The poet does not simply describe how her protagonist feels or tell us crossed by powerlines explicitly what feeling her story should elicit from us. Instead, these compressed, and knows intense poems, in which every word is necessary and none is wasted, dramatize something is missing the character’s states of mind and body. This creates in the reader a strong sense of her emotions and experiences. This achievement, and Melanie’s dra- matic, energetic use of language, partakes of the essence of poetry. 20 K A L E I D O S C O P E F A L L 2 0 0 4 do i dare nothing about my like you’re around i can’t connect looking around the house every corner with these thinking you’ll eventually turn you worry too much you shadows up a lost scarf something exotic write i can hear the you send and i tell nothing about tone and it’s much too to torment me keeping my air conditioner lighthearted nor rattling away all night for my taste get any satisfaction drowning out voices and noises both from knowing inside 9.19 you are not here you and out of my head so i try to correspond are not i certainly can’t bring up communicate here how i drove reply out of town and you say 9.18 into the coolness to the a letter would your phone is cutting farm where you lived this summer have been fine out cutting one night late music too loud and i am confused me as you are sitting and what did i expect because this is outside of a spectre of your previous what i thought i gave you the hospital self jumping in front but you won’t tell me of my car saying no why you’re there or no stop you’ve missed the you say what you’ve been doing for turn and i’ve been waiting for you so that was a poem these weeks of my nonexistence long my plans were to skip work and i am frightened to you and make love to you by this unintentional poem all morning like maybe i guess it’s the monitors no i’ve given away heart machines keeping i finally had to turn back more than i meant to people alive all pulsing out by the interstate or that this is together in a mechanical way that watch degrees rise the only way causes the as i head back into more i think anymore interference concrete or maybe you’re when i keep asking questions chiding myself fucking with my head and there’s a space where i know maybe i just don’t have the right senses because other than you are talking you’re really that you’ve told me saying wonderful things i’m all around me nothing sure but i just can’t hear them burying your face in my hair i don’t want to i only am tuned back in for you looking ask these questions again to say into me it gives you power i’m here maybe if i just try harder i don’t know you of all things you will appear why i kid myself are not here but now you’re saying like maybe i’m putting maybe you’re making these silences yourself to you have to go a gauze curtain save and i still don’t know between me and the thoughts or see me react why fact of your power i can’t react and tell why you’re even there now it’s been you nothing why i feel another week THE UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY JOURNAL OF UNDERGRADUATE SCHOLARSHIP 21 with nothing you’ll feel a brush of it 9.21 and i’m looking all the way over there i am letting the for excuses and think some small wind phone ring as we and swatting them has kissed your cheek sit at my kitchen away as they come because that’s what my table eating cheap fluttering round anger dissolves into chinese food for because really when i think about your breakfast on a you should be giving me cheek slight overlapping sunday morning excuses of your front teeth they should any part of you we listen to the be pouring out of for that matter) message together you like wine on speakerphone turning my head does it matter and see what he making my face redden i wonder if you know has to say something you know how finally i had about you could do it to put your soap are you okay it would be so easy away and a troubling and i would write poems out of my shower dream that i knew were poems because every time i don’t know to you stepping in whether to cry if you’d let me your scent or smile but we but somehow was making let it drop you i know my insides blink said there’s no you’d think they were letters i would take it in my point in jealousy hands marvel at the because if there’s a 9.20 fact that yes reason to be jealous your damp self stood some contour of the woman is already cheekbone in this very spot gone at the time this yes you were in this house is mesmerizing me seemed many hours a dance of enlightened flesh over but now i feel like sometimes bone it shows your i look then unwillingness a second glance for some message you might to fight for things and all falls away have left lying around crumbling and constructing i’d like to think itself into the un-you-ness it makes me that you’d have angry that i find fought to keep me that there is nothing unbearable or at least put nothing of mine in an appearance in your life (why am i mad at at our final moment nothing to inspect all of these people but you haven’t even for not being you inhale let me know that handle it makes more sense much if our final for hope of grabbing to concentrate my anger moment has even happened tunnel funnel it all some small essence into you so maybe left behind 22 K A L E I D O S C O P E F A L L 2 0 0 4 A LETTER WOULD HAVE BEEN FINE M E L A N I E F E E i talked about how 10.01 that weeks conversational how plus months i’d like to think fucking conversational are not erasing that soon that table was anything i could walk down you and me sitting the street there like a happy 10.29 you’d pass farmhouse couple i climb and i wouldn’t even see you having an argument not the kind of up and down about whether fitzgerald pretending the branches really counts as an american on my wallpaper to not see you novelist since he was an that i might try every night expatriate to see how you’d react to get a better perspective but really showing i remember you asking me how gone you are see about virginia woolf the from my consciousness a little farther night we met i could