AFTER LEARNING MY FRIEND HAS DIED
And so it begins,
the tallying backwards
to remember: when was the last
telephone call, the last
text message, last email,
the last time seeing her face, her skin still
lovely smooth in her 69th year–
hearing her buoyant laughter that late
afternoon on her patio, September sun
lighting up the back of her head in the photo
she later joked finally made her
into some form of angelic being.
*
TO THIS DAY
for Rosemary
The calendar marks three weeks
to this day your heart
slowed to a crawl,
then stopped.
Three weeks that might be
three hundred years
or none at all–
there are no inbetweens,
no middle grounds
in this land of your leaving.
*
Andrea Potos is author of several poetry collections, including her newest book Her Joy Becomes (Fernwood Press). Others include: Marrow of Summer (Kelsay Books), Mothershell (Kelsay Books), A Stone to Carry Home (Salmon Poetry), An Ink Like Early Twilight (Salmon Poetry), We Lit the Lamps Ourselves (Salmon Poetry) and Yaya’s Cloth (Iris Press). Her poems can be found widely in print and online, most recently in The Sun, Poetry East, Potomac Review, Braided Way, and How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope (Storey Publishing), and The Path to Kindness (Storey Publishing). Andrea lives in Madison, Wisconsin where she was a longtime bookseller in independent bookstores.
Oh friend, such beautiful homages to your beloveds. I especially love in the first poem how it begins with a death in the title, but as we move toward the end of the poem, she is increasingly alive.