Letter from Iowa
On July 23, 2020 I read the only letter that you sent.
In it, you said you couldn’t think of what
to get your friends to show you cared
without us thinking you were crazy,
so you wrote letters instead;
You also gave me a framed
picture collage of young Joseph Stalin,
tacos,
and Tim posing in his geography t-shirt.
I still have that too,
hung three feet above the pile
and the letter.
I never wrote back.
I was 16.
I don’t remember why.
*
Outside, the snow is falling again.
The judging, silent snow.
I’m writing this from my bed.
It’s Saturday,
and I was going to
clean,
but
then I found your letter again
buried in the chaos of my closet
in a tattered envelope
with the glue still clinging.
At the bottom of the page, a dark old circle
is now dry.
*
I don’t know what to message you.
I hope the sound of me tapping
the space key
is good enough.
That night,
as you watched Portland
blur
behind the windows and the clouds,
I should have cried.
*
You came back to Newberg last Christmas.
I only found out afterward
when you posted pictures of you
and the PDX carpet, you
and Betty, you and Tim, you
and Sándor, you and Nathan, you
and people I didn’t know you knew.
*
I’m writing you my letter now.
I’m trying to explain it. I am.
The sense that it didn’t matter.
This is part of it:
I was not that close with you,
but I pretended to be.
You looked like syrup.
I cupped my hands
before you. Then pushed them
into you like a spigot. That way,
I learned
you didn’t function
like a maple tree.
*
As shitty as it is,
you were a lesson to me.
I learned
I wouldn’t find solutions
to my problems
outside of me.
They were all in here, this closet
in my brain. Nothing
with anyone else
mattered
*
But
we stopped talking
long before I stopped responding.
We found other friends
and we preferred them.
We were visitors in each others’ lives,
and I didn’t want to think
that mattered.
*
I’m coming back to Newberg soon
are you there? you ask.
You always made yourself
available
without offering anything.
That’s why
I don’t imagine
it was your fault
when I didn’t offer either.
*
We exchange messages
for the first time in years, and
we ignore all of this.
*
in your pictures:
you wearing
church clothes,
long drifts
of cloth
*
I remember laying in the parish lawn,
snow printing dark circles
on our shirts;
the clouds looked like
confessionals; I heard our voices in them.
When we finally stood, we saw our
hollow imprints
but
you called them
angels
*
Outside,
clumps of snow
slough from maple branches.
They are like letters.
Fresh snow confettis down
to cover them
*
I will lay outside and feel it
melting on my cheek.