#charlesapplegate

"It hadn’t occurred to me, really--it was an oversight, a cognitive omission of sorts. Or simple inattentiveness, perhaps, a near-gaffe of preoccupation that seems, now, a little clumsy. Maybe a bit clumsier than that. Maybe I was rather clumsy, quite clumsy. Probably it was clumsy, was oafish, to submit a poem to you when I am not an Amy.

I am not an Amy; I know that. I did not think about that, about the nomenclatural nature of destiny and how an annal can close at Christening. I ignored your names, and I ignored my own, and that is more than clumsy--it is treacherous, duplicitous, an apostate perfidy.  Worse, I ignored that I am not a woman, or female, or anything other than a vast, baritone column of manly WASP cis-het pinstripe privilege a-swagger through Northern California in size-fifteen wingtips, dirty-blonde son riding my shoulders like a prince astride a purebred horse. 

I am thoughtless, blundering, oblivious; I am precipitate and only retroactively conscientious. I am not unapologetic or utterly unaware, though; while I am not Amy or normatively like Amy, I am analogously of Amy and I am, like Amy, sorry. 

I am so very, very sorry, Amy; I am so sorry." 

  A Little Bit of Help 

If I'd known it would be that way

I would have ground them for you;

how could I guess the dress-shoe pestle,

the slow crunch of pills crushed one by one 

in the closet of housebound clothes,

guess you harrowed, gasping, groping

through cluttered twilight for the shoe, 

the prescription bottle?  When 

I left the doctor's office in Ohio,

a fistful of samples dry in my mouth

and that swindled scrip dead in my palm

all seemed final.  You died that October 

but for me you died in March, stiffened

and cyanodized before I filled 

your scrip, fulfilled your final wish,  

before I sent your pills by parcel post.  

For me, you died while I leaned on my car

in a parking lot, drug samples, cigarettes,

passers-by and absent geese and traffic

all helping me forget what we'd done. 

If I'd known it would be that way

I would have ground them for you

but I made you work for that bitter dust,