To Tell You the Truth To tell you the truth I am done with all this poetry of grief. What else is there to say? And here? How many deaths in this part of the world deserve the poetry of loss they are given when elsewhere entire cities are immolated and forgotten? We wish for such gentle dying while we mete out so many horrors. This may be the kind of talk our afternoon coffee would elicit Mike. * You are the only guy I’ve ever known who quit the circus because of the way elephants were tortured to get them to do their tricks. Sometimes, these days, I wonder who the elephants are and who is their torturer. Now that you have gone and all the hospices in the world could not spare you those final days of inscrutable pain I am left bereft of anyone to speak to the way we would speak to each other about such things. * I have your guitar and your giant fern. I have distributed those tomato plants and talked to your lovely child until I felt I might be talking with you. The house is empty when I come back for the keyboard she has given me. * I am sorry for the meanness of dying. The meanness of family mourning, the cruelty of life continuing when you have not, how people hurt one another when they are hurt. I know. It is not mine to be sorry for. Still… * Sometimes when the city is friendless a friend materializes. And just as mysteriously that friend is gone. Oh, choirs of the righteous take Mike into your harmonies and sing stories of his fascinating life with him, give him a friend to sing near as he sang near me. * That last day we spoke in his kitchen after he’d fallen yet again, he told me his dream of soaring almost gladly above the mess of this world its beauty and its carnage “Because, you know it will happen”
Mike and I met in a community choir. We hit it off almost immediately, though our talking and laughter disturbed some of the other choir members who were an inexplicably somber lot not given to easy socialization or even joy. At least not in connection to me or Mike.
He reminded me of friends I made in school when I was a boy… and the reason my report cards often checked the “needs improvement” box under their “self-control” heading… meaning I talked too much. But, having made listening my primary occupation for so many years in my adult life, Mike gave me a glad opportunity to spend time with someone who shared many of my eclectic interests and a penchant for great animated conversation. We had a blast. Although he hated the snow here and I love it!
Our friendship was easy and unpressured; I am so grateful for it. The progress (if it can be called that) of his cancer became just a part of the wide spectrum of things we talked about. Cruel fucking disease. Mike bore up under it with courage, good humor, and realistic optimism.
It’s been hard to find such camaraderie here. What a relief to find and be found by Mike! I’ll miss our time together deeply. It’s a little miracle to find others like Mike just when they are most needed.
This may be one of your most beautiful poems.
What a poignant and lovely poem, Bob, as well as a touching piece about Mike and your friendship.
I wish I could be done with poems of grief but that beast keeps on following and finding me and won’t let me out of its grasp. Yet I hear and understand what you’re saying. There is so much unspeakable loss on the planet, due to the evil and cruelty of others.
And eventually every person we know will suffer one or multiple losses of people dear to them. Who am I to suggest that my pain, my grief, is somehow deeper, more excruciating, more valid than yours, your neighbor’s or anyone else’s? Yet I am human. We are human. And we feel what we feel. Expressing it in writing helps not only the writer, but the reader too, when words about how we feel reach those sad, lonely and aching places deep within another person.