Coalemus
I’m sick and I’m gonna get drunk. Coal,
short for Coalemus, walked into my home
like it was his own—no gratitude for his
and his wife’s invitation for Thanksgiving,
not even a Hi, good to see you—just I’m
sick and I’m gonna get drunk. He sat
in our porch room, holding a bottle of wine
he made sure not to share with anyone.
At dinner, he sat in regal silence, not
deigning to converse while the rest of us,
seven in all, engaged in lively conversation.
He reached in his pocket, pulled out his
cellphone, and began to…what? Check
his email? Thumb through his Facebook
page? I asked him, quietly, if we were
boring him. Yes, he said. After dinner
my wife excused herself because she was
ill. This left me with a massive clean-up.
Coal made no effort to help me clear
the table, scrape the dishes, bag the leftovers.
He rose from the table, went into our
porch room, and fell asleep on our couch.
His wife tried to help, but she had to drive
her drunken husband back home. On his
way out the door, Coal barely glanced
my way. He had always been obnoxious,
something I tolerated over our fifty-year
friendship. He had become, to me, like
a family member you really don’t like,
but feel obligated to invite for holidays,
birthdays, special occasions. I’ve come to
believe that friendships often have
an existential expiration date. The last
Thursday of 2024 was ours.
__________
Missing Monica
Death steals everything except our stories.
–Jim Harrison
I
I’ve been hearing her voice ever
since I found out
she no longer had a voice.
Missing Monica, it turns out,
is a full-time occupation.
Too young, too young, to have
cancer, too young to die of it.
We used to send poems
to each other. She might
question a simplistic simile, erase
a misbegotten metaphor, or praise
a phrase she liked. She
was an astute and generous critic.
She always had time to respond
to me.
Why?
I was just an old guy who attended
a writers’ conference
she worked for. Still, she
sometimes sat next to me
on the porch steps—
asked how my writing was coming.
We had little in common beyond
happy marriages, a love of poetry,
and of anything Jim Harrison wrote.
II
Six weeks ago, Devouring Time,
a biography of Jim Harrison
came out. I thought of Monica.
I wanted to send her the book.
I’d heard she’d been in the hospital,
tortured again by the nasty
crustacean crawling through her blood.
I wrote an email asking how
she was and where
she was. I never got a reply.
Two weeks after my email to her,
a signed copy of Jim’s
biography appeared at my door.
It came from a bookstore in Traverse City—
no card, no information
on who sent it.
I’ve asked everyone I know who could have
sent me that book.
Did we have the same idea
to send that book
to each other?
Could it have come from Monica,
delivered by death’s pinion
poised on the abyss?
Monica, gone to that rough-hewn
realm of silence where
we mourn in a universe gone dark.
Still, we have her stories, stories
that death can never steal.
__________
Forever
We walk toward a future that disappears
as soon as we get there. Our fate, it seems,
is to find people we love and then lose
them to inevitable darkness. It’s then that
we learn that forever has always been there.
The day-to-day may begin as a gilded
castle on a hill, but end as an abandoned
building—windows broken, walls crumbled—
a burned-out husk of what it once was.
We are, I suppose, about as significant as
the period at the end of this sentence,
although we are told that the universe
was once that small, as small as a period
at the end of a sentence, so dense that
it just had to explode into life.
Rusty Truck 