October 6, 2016
I told someone about you, Naomi.
She asked me are you writing her love letters?
(The rest of my mail: bills, coupons, catalogs, the sweaters I buy online.)
I answered my friend: I don’t know what to call them.
I gave her a piece of truth as the whole, the simplest kind of lie.
This morning, I thought of Petrarch and Laura, whose love I studied first in college.
My Italian professor told us — all women students — he saw her once by a fountain in the year 1327 and he loved her forever, but she refused him.
We sat in a circle around him, our notebooks open.
At the time, I thought the sonnet a powerful gift.
That a man’s desire for a woman gave us a pattern to call love.
Today if I write a sonnet it is always Petrarch’s:
how the poem’s turn arrives in its mid-life, not its end.
I struggled in my younger days with a keen but constant and pure attachment, Petrarch wrote in a letter.
My youth was gone before I realised it.
Perhaps love is not a moment’s urge, but a sort of formal overlay.
How the poem turns in your hands while I wait.
* * * * *
October 30, 2016
A man I once loved said forgive me each time he committed even the smallest transgression.
He’d drink the last beer in the fridge and say forgive me as he lowered his body to mine on the
couch.
Forgive me I have borrowed your sweater without permission.
Forgive me the dog has not yet eaten.
I never understood whom he asked to forgive him — for I find myself incapable of forgiveness.
To the man I always replied I love you, not I forgive you.
The night he said I don’t love you, an awful August storm soaked the bedsheets.
(Forgive me, I have forgotten to close the window.)
A body needs its testimony, to make sure the error is heard.
The man left me lighter than he arrived — a sheet wrung clean of his mistakes.
Instead of forgive me, Naomi, I will try to ask you to listen.
As in:
Forgive me Listen I am expected back in Boston by tomorrow and I need to keep your suitcase—
Forgive me Listen I have hung the linens to dry in the bathtub but they keep dripping, and dripping, and dripping—
* * * * *
[unsent draft]
Last night, Naomi, I typed piano music where you can hear the pianist breathing into my browser.
I tried to write to you at one A.M. and couldn’t begin, the habit of morning-letters already set.
Last night the ivory ranunculus — birthday flowers from a friend, the friend newly and still in love —finally opened on my writing desk, bright until their heads hung from the weight of their openness.
At my desk I searched for two women fucking and found nothing intimate enough to arouse me.
I refreshed my Twitter feed after a woman tweeted so often we sleep through the horrors of the world.
Last night I did not sleep, but I did nothing kind with my wakefulness.
I bought two books of poems online with the sole intention of reading them to you, thinking about how they would make you feel.
Last night I read that the season for ranunculus is April and felt guilty for my atemporal hungers.
For loving flowers that flatten the world.
* * * * *
March 1, 2017
I dreamt that you died last night, Naomi.
At your funeral the mourners ate peeled oranges out of plastic bags and stood over your grave, and I wept, my mouth full of pith.
Without you, in the dream, I began to relearn the life I must live in your absence.
I walked the dog twice around the block, following the mail carrier until he reached the house with nothing from you.
I opened a book and read Liu Xia’s lines — a life without pain is an unpicked fruit — in an empty house until I believed your absence brought my life intention.
It grew easy enough after a time because I came to understand that you had not chosen to leave me.
I could become someone new, standing in the footprints left by grief.