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I’ve stopped.
I’ve stopped remembering your voice, its timbre; I’ve stopped feeling your body, the way you stood high over me, the solidity of you, how it overwhelmed me, and I got used to it and loved your size. No matter. I’ve stopped feeling it. I’ve also stopped criticizing—the stomach that got too big, that got in the way. I think now it was part of the growing cancer, but I am not sure. I hope I wasn’t too critical- -more in my head than spoken. I hope. In any case, there’s nothing to criticize anymore.
I was impressed when you started taking poetry classes. I think it was first at City College, where I was teaching, and you took JS’s class. Or was it before then, when you went to readings at Bird and Beckett and participated once in a while in a workshop there? Neely, a strange name. You liked him. The other old guy – good poets, really, both now dead. Of course. Isn’t everyone?
And you always read poetry. I’d praised and joked—joking as praise, which we both knew—that you were the only person who would take a volume of poetry on an trans-Atlantic flight to keep you engaged. I’d praised—silently, mostly—your taste in good things: shoes for you, fine leather ones, coats, even a particular hat, but you didn’t like hats much, just saw them as necessary sometimes, against the sun, against the cold.
I’ve become cold. I don’t praise. Actually, I don’t think.
Friend, acquaintances, ask whether I’ve joined a match service, sometimes urge me to. I like men. I yearn, silently, secretly, when I see a young man, one of size, and forget how old I am now and become, inside, the woman of 43 who met you that day, impressed then with your height, your quiet sense of self, your mind, your sense of adventure.
These are such vague phrases. They could be said of so many people; they are pointless. They are not praise, they are words.
I do wonder if it’s possible that there would be an old man, sitting next to me in the theatre (as there was last night, but I was engaged with my step-niece, my step-son, relegated now to “steps” in life, when they appear)- – I wonder if it’s possible that there would be an old man of wide shoulders, of height, of size, who would see me and want to talk to me, who would say Let’s get a drink—do you want to? I wonder if I could feel the attraction that I felt initially and went on feeling? Do I want that? I’ve become resigned but not unhopeful.
Your son, your youngest son, was here yesterday. He praises himself, but does it in a sort of bashful, almost sheepish way. He is enormously successful. I praise him; he is sweet. Your sons. I like to claim them, having lost my own.
I should learn to talk about something else, really.
I mention things we’ve done, things you’ve said. We all do that. We, the widows, friends becoming widows within a year of one another. We carry on.
I’ve stopped praising you to you. Did I ever? Am I one of those stupid women who realize what they had only when it’s gone? I don’t think so. I had trial runs before, trial marriages really—enough to know the difference.
Do I miss you? Who am I? I don’t know.
I’ve become this insulated person. I am not praising me, what I have become. I just am, and you are not. It’s not a situation anyone can praise.