Open Shutters Read Online Free Page A

shock.)
    An accident—you broke your neck? Your back?
    Shameful I don’t remember—and for three
    years you’d take a detour to avoid
    the sight of it: that swinging, high red light
    somebody ran, that road that crossed a road.
    A run-through of the sped-up, drawn-out second
    of terror before your second, actual end.
    Swinging past the turnoff to your clinic
    today, I saw I’d never choose to drive
    that street again; would steer around the panic
    rather than fail to find you there alive.
8.
    Notice—but you can’t—I don’t write your name.
    People aren’t characters.
Here’s my concession
    (small) to that view, and your need of privacy
    which, I suspect, went beyond your profession.
    When I knew you—no, you knew
me
—I’d missed the easy
    truth we had acquaintances in common.
    (A good thing, probably, I’d been too dim
    to ask you; you too classy to let on.)
    Nor did I find the public facts in print
    (
age 53, father of three, an active
    member of his church
) until you’d long
    been dead. That July I came and went.
    You reached me in a place I don’t belong—
    seventeen months later, Christmas Eve.
9.
    I’d got there early, casually saved a front
    pew for the whole family with some flung
    mittens and hats. (In gestures we assume
    the shoulder-to-shoulder permanence of home.)
    Shouldn’t we come more often? “The Power of Love”:
    our sermon. A list called “Flowers in Memory of”
    on the program’s final page. I was feeling faint.
    Your name. Your father’s name? Something was wrong.
    I knew it was you. The church was going black.
    Head down: my first anxiety attack
    since the bad old days. Your face at the restaurant.
    My plate heaped up with food I didn’t want.
    Keep the head down. People would be saying
    to themselves (and close enough) that I was praying.
10.
    Revise our last encounter. I’d rather say
    it was that day a decade ago we made
    a formal farewell: I was going away
    on a long trip. If I needed you, I said,
    when I got back, I’d be sure to give a call.
    You stood up, and I finally saw how tall
    you were; I’d never registered how fit.
    Well, all we’d done for a year was talk and sit.
    Paris,
you said. Then, awkwardly,
Lucky you.
    Possessor of my secrets, not a friend,
    colder, closer, our link unbreakable.
    Yet we parted better than people often do.
    We looked straight at each other. Was that a smile?
    I thanked you for everything. You shook my hand.

For Emily at Fifteen
        Sirens living in silence, why would they leave the sea?
                                                —Emily Leithauser
    Allow me one more try,
    though you and I both know
    you’re too old now to need
    writing about by me—
    you who composed a sonnet
    and enclosed it in a letter,
    casually, with family news,
    while I was away;
    who rummaged in convention’s
    midden for tools and symbols
    and made with them a maiden
    voyage from mere verse
    into the unmapped world
    of poetry. A mermaid
    (like Eve, you wrote—a good
    analogy, and yet
    your creature acts alone)
    chooses to rise from wordless
    unmindful happiness
    up to the babbling surface
    of paradox and pain.
    I whose job it’s been
    to protect you read my lesson:
    you’ll wriggle from protection.
    Half-human and half-fish
    of adolescence, take
    my compliments, meant half
    as from a mother, half
    one writer to another,
    for rhymes in which you bury
    ironies—for instance,
    sirens
into
silence;
    and since I’ve glimpsed a shadow,
    forgive how glad I felt
    when I set down your sonnet
    to read your letter again
    with only silliness in it,
    the old tenth-grade bravado:
    “Oh well, I bombed the chem test.
    Latin’s a yawn a minute.”

Midsummer, Georgia Avenue
    Happiness: a high, wide porch, white columns
    crowned by the crepe-paper party hats
    of hibiscus; a rocking chair; iced tea; a book;
    an afternoon in late July to read it,
    or read the middle of it, having leisure
    to mark the place and enter