#SOL16: Dear Friends and Relatives

This is a poem Rob wrote after he received an email from a friend/sister, Marilyn Harrison, last spring. I found the poem on his laptop and wanted to share it. Rob grew up with Marilyn and her sister Joyce in Brooklyn. Marilyn died from cancer on July 12, 2015. When Rob wrote the poem he had no way of knowing that he would be diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer a month after Marilyn's death.

Dear Friends and Relatives

today, i'm stuck

an old friend 

has written an email—

well

not a friend exactly, something 

else, more on the order of

an almost sister

i never see anymore

my mother's best friend's 

oldest daughter, 

my age, my contemporary

estranged

& sick

progressed, she says

putting my affairs in order

in my own satisfying way

induces cascade failure,

a widening cataract of

incomplete stories

accelerated by gravity

a few days later, 

a phone call

& the rest of the story 

is out

yeah, we'll get together

i think, 

& about a month from now

maybe we will—

i'll fly out to san fran

and spend a few days

tracking  haunts

i've never visited

as if this accounts

for what's being lost

& then what?

i'll have to leave 

& we'll both know

i'm  likely not coming back 

save maybe one more time

but for those few days

we'll remember all kinds of 

childhood stories, tell ourselves

others that fill in blanks

with the kind of honesty

that comes with 

the clarity of finality—

and then we'll tell the rest

           

the ones meant to soften

the truths 

our lives no longer 

intermingle

save 

for occasional news

we'll no longer get

& though we'll mourn 

what never was

in those farewell moments 

i'll  turn away

from that all

to get on a plane

& fly home

to what i left to come here:

an ongoing life,

a wife, 

a son, 

& who knows what

while she'll have left here

all to go back home

& lie in the quiet 

down of a who knows when

forgotten morning 

too soon come