M - To That Mythic Country Called Closure

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Cate
Posts: 3464
Joined: Tue Nov 06, 2007 4:27 am

M - To That Mythic Country Called Closure

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link to the audio - http://www.rattle.com/poetry/2013/07/fo ... dows-by-m/
M

FOR THOSE WHO NEVER KNOW
WHAT TO SAY TO WIDOWS

Two months after the funeral, leave your wife and two teenage sons, drive fourteen hours straight from Eagle to walk up our porch unannounced. Open the garage door the way people used to. The remote is broken. Fix it. Take four truckloads of scrap lumber, crumbling drywall, and junk appliances to the dump. Cook a chili so fine we forget our lost appetites. Open a bottle of anything that costs less than a sympathy card. Lie behind us on the futon. Touch us, because other than one 20-minute appointment with a gynecologist’s plastic speculum, we’ve gone from being touched all the time to being held as if we’d spent half a hot day cleaning Cutthroats from Gore Creek. Tell us that story. Again. The one where you and Nick drop acid and drive his flat-black Valiant with no dashboard to Wyoming to hunt jackalope. In a blizzard. About getting to milk one because the females sleep belly up. Say, No, honest. Waking up in the Casper rescue mission wearing other people’s clothes. Say, Hey, it was monomyth, babe. Sleep in the guest room. After breakfast, tie down Nick’s ’74 Suzuki in your truckbed with red ratchet straps, slap the seat once she’s secure. Say, He was an original. Kiss us like you mean something, even though you don’t know what the hell that is. Maybe it’s just three decades of Nick, and we’re the last thing that touched him. Take I-80 east. Manage to keep your shit together until Elko, at least.

—from Rattle #38, Winter 2012
2012 Rattle Poetry Prize Finalist
a good gift/book for those who have lost spouses or are experiencing grief. I've just ordered it myself as I like this poet quite a bit - it was on my Christmas list, but I think the title made my husband think it 'unchristmasy'.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/097971 ... PDKIKX0DER
Cate
Posts: 3464
Joined: Tue Nov 06, 2007 4:27 am

Re: M - To That Mythic Country Called Closure

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