for Lynda Hull
“Today everything was glazed with ice after a brief thaw
then a plunge in temp. So the news was full of spectacular
25 and 40 car smash-ups. Weather & traffic as metaphor?
I won’t touch that one!”
1.
Found this message on a postcard from you
by accident about a month or so
after your death.
What did it matter then I’d stuck the card
as placemarker in a collection of stories?
What did it matter then if you were in Amsterdam
or New Jersey or Chicago?
Always in motion,
back and forth, faster and faster.
That was the danger—so much so soon.
One friend seeing your picture in the paper
mistook your obituary for an announcement
you’d won another poetry prize.
2.
That line to me about weather and traffic
was just a joke—who supposedly knows less
about weather than a Southern Californian?
And who knows more about traffic
than a Los Angeles poet, anyway?
And who knew more about death
than you who turned away
from that follow spot more than once,
the chanteuse who stopped shooting her blood
full of jazzy soporific juice?
Who knew more about flirting with death
kiss-on-the-cheek flirting,
and smoky dancing thigh against thigh with it
down the chasm of love?
3.
Everybody knew it would come, it would come
to end you earlier than most,
no old woman sitting in a room, dreary
on a white-sheeted bed.
It would come in high relief, it would come
like numbness in a needle, cold as overdose
even what you said you weren’t using anymore.
It would come because it always comes—
just like Chet Baker falling out of that window,
just like falling in love with how blood is dark and tasty.
It would come because you were
a hand-leaving glove kind of gal,
risky as rhinestones before 5:00 p.m.
4.
Skinny saint, I would have put some meat on your bones
if you had slept with me.
But you were my guardian angel
and not anywhere near available for lust,
not anywhere available to me
since I didn’t need saving,
just revising.
My belated epitaph comes down to
this shambles of intention.
I have a postcard from you that set elegy in motion,
and it keeps tumbling like a mantra of remembrance
or a cajoling spell for more words,
more poems as deep and lush as trumpet bells,
poems to love for their sheen and tactile intelligence,
chiaroscuro in language your metier.
5.
Come to your senses, I say. She is dead,
and I place that foreign feeling squarely in front of me
like a postcard of a room in which the chair of an artist
painted by another artist sits empty.
Originally published in Cider Press Review, Volume 1.
