Poetry

 

 

The man sitting next to me on the plane

was tanned. We chatted, laughed

over the pictures in his Vanity Fair,

and when he called my attention

to the view he said put his life

into perspective, looked out the window

at the clouds below.

I said that after a year of deaths

and dismantlings, I looked forward

to visiting my daughter, who was studying

in Europe. He spoke of recent vacations,

so many, I teased, You must not work.

I’m a lawyer, he said. Figures, I said.

But after we handed the flight attendant

our dinner trays, he turned to the side,

unzipped his carry-on, and from a large,

white prescription bottle, counted out

a palmful of pills.

 

What did you say the first time someone

told you they had AIDS?

 

I just sat there dumbstruck, watching him

swallow those pills with water from a clear

plastic cup. But when I heard the concern

in his voice for me: Is this the first time

you’ve met one of us?

 

I placed my hand on his, and like an old

married couple, we leaned back, and talked

through the night. About my life. His.

The eleven years he’d lived while so many

died; the last few when he, too, was close

to death, and now was not—all because

of this new combination of pills.

Someday, he said, someday I’ll write about it.

But mostly he talked about the partner he lost.

A psychologist, he said. He analyzed everything—

drove me crazy sometimes. But I told him things

I never told anyone before or since.

To him, everything was myth.

He was so smart, he said.

You’re smart, I said.

Not like him, he said. Not like him.

And then he turned to the window again. Look.

And we looked down at the trees.

 

I loved Venice. Each day my daughter

and I drank cappuccino, and ate gelato.

And in every church and cathedral

we entered, I knelt and prayed for the dead.

I wondered where they’d gone.

Then I lit a candle for them,

and one for the man with AIDS.

When we rode the vaporetti, I loved

looking back at the city, and the people

strolling beside the canals. I wondered

about their lives. And I wished I was younger.

 

On the drive through Tuscany, there was mist

in the air. With the Eyewitness guidebook

open on her lap, and speaking fake Italian,

Nicole and I laughed ourselves silly

singing the name of each town out loud:

Poggibonsi...San Miniato...

Bagni de Lucca...Torre de Lago...

And we squabbled. But not much. Sometimes

at night, when we were thoroughly tired,

and had waited too long to get a room.

And on the Autostrada, because Nicole

was under twenty-five and couldn’t drive

the rental, and I let all the cars

sail past us, meaning: I kept it under

a hundred.

 

I didn’t know about Rilke then,

or Keats, or Severin. Nor did I know

about Eliot, or ever hear April

described as the cruelest month,

but after Nicole returned to school,

and I flew home to northern New England,

to the havoc left by winter: the mud,

desiccated leaves, and loneliness—

all the sadness came back. And despair.

 

So because it was my habit, I wrote

in my journal. If the black flies weren’t bad,

and it was warm enough, I sat on my deck

and wrote. If not, I wrote inside, often

into the night. In fact, I did nothing

but write. Mostly about people I’d loved

and lost, places I remembered.

Sometimes I muttered to myself. Sometimes

I stared into space. Sometimes I cried.

And all the while, in the corner

of my eye, the man next to me on the plane

leaned back, and listened.

His eyes were blue.

And now I remember—I was writing

about him, and at the same time

I was thinking about Christ on the cross.

And then I was thinking about Lazarus,

how he suffered and died twice. And that’s when

it happened. For the first time, the right

margin became ragged, some words

began to rhyme.

 

Christine Korfhage’s poem, “My Father’s Voice,” was recently selected by Sydney Lea for the upcoming anthology of poems, The Breath of Parted Lips: Voices From the Robert Frost Place, Volume II. She holds an MFA from Bennington College.