“Could you make a poem out of that?”
We weren’t ladies who lunch,
except once when you came
down from the horse farm to
see a painting of a horse.
Dear country mouse, your city
cousin would like to meet with
you again and talk of horses
and paintings and villanelles.
Is there a poem in any of that?
Let us dine together once more,
gorging on berries you canned,
downing them out of season for no
reason at all but pleasure.
Max, you lived free and died,
and I am still on the eighteenth floor
of life, wanting to continue
my conversation with you.
Could you make a poem out of that?
I guess you could. You made a poem
from the winking of a mare’s vulva, and
from the deaths of a woodchuck family,
garden pests you killed yourself.
The table is laid but you will not come.
Dreamy pragmatist, you knew there is only
this earthly heaven. Never mind. I’ll sit here
with your book for company.
There will surely be poetry in that.
Hilma Wolitzer’s novels include An Available Man and The Doctor’s Daughter. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, New Letters, the Southampton Review, and Prairie Schooner. She has taught in several university writing programs. Among her honors are grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.