Why I Cannot Begin, Dear Friend

by ROBERT McNAMARA

Perhaps I heard nothing all those years, saw you for myself,

her friend and mine, joining us in food and close talk,

or those brilliant summer afternoons. Perhaps

I knew you were making love to her the way one knows that

the man on the bench is waiting for no one, though

he looks at his watch, taps his foot, folds and unfolds

his paper. I’ve wanted to kill you, and some days the sound

of people I love talking in the next room, talking in the

cautious

tones of the half-empty elevator, leaning so that the breath

and flicker of the lips arouse the listener’s ear,

is enough. You say that you loved us both,

I would not trap her or another, yet who does not know

how resolutely we dress for hard weather, and the soft place

we shelter underneath? Did you think you could swallow

these contradictions? Love may be a crane or a sparrow,

this hard place, that blackness expanding, drawing us all in

and down. I wonder how you spoke to yourself

as we walked the beach, or alone in your room, looking out

toward

the wavebreak, or in. What true beginning did you compose

for this doubling middle? I loved you, was touched

by your griefs then, such as you opened,

joyed as I could in what happiness you allowed yourself

to feel or say. Asking what was there: this wound is deepest,

was least expected, will be last to heal. Do not imagine

this will change, or wait on this sky, these clouds hanging

an unflattering backdrop for the trees. I can’t forgive you

this distance, wanting, this wound,

no more.

From “Second Messengers” (Wesleyan University Press: $20, cloth, $9.95, paper; 0-8195-1184-6). McNamara is a lecturer in the writing program at the University of Washington in Seattle. 1990, Robert McNamara. Reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.