You are such an interesting conversation. You belong here.
—Pádraig Ó Tuama, from “How to Be Alone”

•••

“Listen,” I say to you more often than I care to admit,
“You are not going to believe this.”

And then I unspool some fresh horror or indignity
that supports my worst-days feeling that we are all,

truly, going to hell in the proverbial handbasket,
and I don’t even believe in hell, though I do believe

in climate disasters, certainly not helped by humans.
And then I bemoan having to cancel a vacation after

a hurricane devastated my favorite island in the middle
of the sea. (They don’t need the likes of me there now.)

You understand this, along with other minor indignities
of my lucky, lovely, super-privileged, pensioned life.

You don’t consider it whining, though it is. And you—
from your vantage point on high, which is how

I imagine the after, are probably happily in some
heavenly kitchen whipping up beef bourguignon

(no cows killed in this version) with Julia Child—
would, of course, agree with me as I gripe about

the pain-in-the-ass-ness of compiling another
literary journal (all the randomly indented lines…

poets, c’mon!) or about the rats that might or
might not still be rattling around in the attic

or basement (none in traps today, says the rat guy)
or the mundanities of life. But that’s just it, right?

Life—what we the living do. I have no idea what you,
the dead-but-not-gone, do. You, who always know

what to murmur in my mind, who define BFF,
emphasis on the final F, who truly meant it

when, long ago, you promised this friendship
forever.

•••

(for Georgann… of course)