Afterwords
On things that stayed
after the moment was over.
While It’s Warm
After Margaret Sangster’s “The Sin of Omission”
I tell myself I’ll say it later.
When it’s calmer.
When I’m clearer.
When I can say it better.
The heat leaves the cup beside me.
The phone stays face down.
The light shifts against the wall.
The one I meant to call
moves into evening.
I sit there longer than I mean to.
Nothing dramatic happens.
That’s what surprises me.
No door closes.
No great sorrow announces itself.
Only the small passing of a moment
I kept thinking would wait for me.
I reach for it eventually.
The words are still there.
The love is still there.
But something has cooled.
Not gone.
Not ruined.
Just no longer warm.
Season Tickets
A story about a door someone left open.
Years ago,
someone donated symphony tickets
for a handful of students.
I never learned who.
I only knew
that somehow,
one of the seats was mine.
I didn’t read music.
No one in my family went to the symphony.
I had no idea what I was supposed to listen for.
Then the lights went down.
And something in me knew.
I still don’t have better words than that.
For a while,
those tickets let me into a room
I never would have thought to enter on my own.
Then came the years
when wanting things like that
felt hard to justify.
Money has a way
of making beauty feel optional.
I went once in my thirties.
Then not at all.
But the feeling didn’t leave.
It just stood in the lobby,
holding my seat.
A few weeks ago,
I drove to Orange County alone,
sat in the dark,
and there it was again.
Twenty-five years,
and it hadn’t given the seat away.
Someone did this for you, too.
Different door.
Different room.
Maybe they never knew
what they opened.
Maybe you don’t either.
Go back and see
what’s still holding your seat.
Two Cigarettes
After Now, Voyager, 1942
There’s a scene
I’ve watched more times than I’ll admit.
Old movie. Black and white.
The Code had rules then
about what love could look like.
They weren’t allowed to kiss.
So he puts two cigarettes
between his lips,
lights them both,
and hands her one.
That’s it.
And somehow
it says everything.
The smallness of it.
The nerve of it.
His lips, then hers.
They couldn’t show the kiss,
so somebody invented
something better than the kiss.
Whoever you were:
there is nothing finer.
Everything he couldn’t say,
handed over
already lit.
Silver and Gold
After “Make New Friends, but Keep the Old”
Make new friends,
but keep the old.
One is silver
and the other gold.
I knew the words
before friendship had become complicated.
Before people moved.
Before lives divided.
Before there were friends
you loved
and no longer knew.
Back then,
silver and gold
seemed like a ranking.
Gold was better.
Surely everyone knew that.
Years later,
the words still come back.
There are people
who know the life you live today.
And people who remember
the version of you
who hadn’t lived it yet.
Someone knows your work.
Someone remembers your first car.
Someone knows what you’ve become.
Someone still hears the laugh
you had at seventeen.
You don’t keep everyone.
Some friendships finish.
Some loosen.
Some disappear so gradually
you notice only afterward.
And then there are the ones
that somehow remain.
Silver.
Gold.
I used to think
the words were about keeping friends.
Maybe they were also about
being kept by them.
The Hell-Bound Train
After “Tom Gray’s Dream”
My first memory of it
is my grandmother reading aloud
in a tiny apartment in Los Angeles.
An old green book of poems.
An evening.
The Hell-Bound Train.
People climbing aboard.
The dark outside.
A destination already named.
It should have frightened me.
It never did.
I listened for the movement of it.
For what came next.
Years later,
I still have the green book.
I don’t remember every verse.
I remember the train.
And maybe, somewhere inside it,
the room where I first heard it.