What Jerry didn't say is that we've
known each other since I was four and he was six.
So I'll begin a poem at which he was present.
I actually have two poems at which he was present,
but one of them is a sort of dirty poem.
So I thought I'd read the clean one tonight.
It's called "The Gaffe."
If that someone who's me yet not me
who judges me is always with me, as he is, shouldn't he
have been there when I said so long ago that thing I said?
If he who rakes me with such not trivial shame for minor sins
now were there then, shouldn't he
have warned me he'd even now devastate me
for my unpardonable affront?
I'm a child then, yet already I've
composed this conscience-beast, who harries me.
Is there anything else I can say with certainty about who
I was, except that I, that he, could already
draw from infinitesimal transgressions
complex chords of remorse, and orchestrate ever
undiminishing retribution from the hapless rest of myself?
The son of some friends of my parents has died,
and my parents, paying their call, take me along.
And I'm sent out with the dead boy's brother and some others
to play.
We're joking around, and words come to my mind, which,
to my amazement, are said.
"How do you know when you can laugh when somebody dies,
your brother dies?"
is what's said, and the others go quiet.
The backyard goes quiet.
Everyone stares, and I want to know now
why that someone in me who's me, yet not me, let me say it.
Shouldn't he have told me the contrition cycle would
from then be ever upon me?
It didn't matter that I'd really only wanted
to know how grief ends and when.
I could hear the boy's mother sobbing inside, then stopping,
sobbing, then stopping.
Was the end of her grief already there?
Had her someone in her told her it would end?
Was her someone in her kinder to her,
not tearing at her as mine did, still does, me, for guessing
grief someday ends?
Is that why her sobbing stopped sometimes?
She didn't laugh, though, or I never heard her.
How do you know when you can laugh?
Why couldn't someone have been there in me,
not just to accuse me, but to explain?
The kids were playing again.
I was playing.
I didn't hear anything more from inside, the way now, sometimes,
what's in me is silent, too, and sometimes, though never really,
forgets.
So he was actually the kid who said,
you're not supposed to say things like.
It's true.
He was my leader in all things.
I'm glad that Peggy mentioned Steve Orlen, who's
a poet I admire a lot.
And as I came in, he asked me to read new poems.
So I will.
They're different from my older poems.