I Proofread My Friend’s Last Essay
she never finished before she died, and I connect
my old phone to its charger for the first time
since a week after she’d gone. It doesn’t work.
I mean it does, it still turns on —
our messages preserved from beyond
eighteen months ago now, pinned
honeybees crystalized in their own
sugar and gold, in what they have made
and taken and made and given, together —
but this isn’t what I need.
I need to talk to her. I need to ask,
how did you write your sentences the same
way a river flows, each pause a deliberate
water stone? I need another kind
of punctuation mark to reach out and hold
on to like an anchor, like a hand,
but I’ll always have this larger question
about time. I forgot this morning we push
the light forward, the clocks bewildering
me in their senseless moving on. I’m not ready
for this draft to be final one.
I need to find a new way to talk about the love
and pain I have felt every hour
since our parting, the love and pain
that have bloomed around me
like the trumpet trees in their gusts
of blush and lilac and sun-drawn
yellow, the color I’ve come to associate with her
whenever I see it. Wild and clever,
how these trees show their fullest selves
in the depths of mid-winter, when all
seems dark and we’ve been so long apart
from our final letters, but I’ve read
that trees can talk to each other underground
in their roots and in their cells, far deeper
than first thought. She has changed
me a season’s measure — some people
are born again and again, find each other
as different versions of the same question,
or find each other in the question, and know.
I press my palm to the laptop, the phone
screen, to the crushed yellow flower that falls
open like a song, to the heartbeat
of her words she’s ended on. My pulse is a text
message — I’ll keep trying to hit Send.
about the author
