a letter of sorts

it was strange to read about you,
as if I were reading a book or
maybe watching a movie
about or by someone I had never known.

it was strange to hear from you,
with not even a 'hello,' or a 'how are you'
a second-hand account of
something unordinary that you did last week,

in a discreetly indirect discovery
it was strange to read about the Others,
the ones more direct,
to let the surface of understanding flake off
and fall before my eyes,
to know that those there are really there

as a boat on still waters, quiet sadness came slowly and incompletely
like the way I feel when I look at new pictures of very old Moscow
I don't mean this to sound like it's not the way it should be,
because I know it probably is
the people who were my family once cannot now be:
I cannot sit at their table, and
they cannot place sliced lemons on a plate in front of me

somehow a definition of how someone who Loves you
behaves: noting the oddities that define you, but which you do not advertise
and remarking on some of the the small seconds of truth that are your life
a recognition of history, a story strung with memories and moments shared

this is the independence of movement,
like a boat in the center of a lake at night
viewing distant shores; soundlessly floating farther inward
away from all shores, impossibly and imperceptibly

lately, I've been wanting to call my mother.
and have her tell me about myself,
self-evidence in conversation that she's known me all my life
maybe by asking me if I'm still wearing sweaters in the summertime

in conversation, she would say she saw me coming to this
she would tell me it was a good place to come actually
she would see that these moments are
a thread woven into a pattern of a person
in the cloth of a life

she would tell me that the boat still loves the shore
that it will always love the shore
she would sing its song
telling how it still breathes and thrives and pulses with its own life
even though it does nothing desperate anymore to return to Moscow now.

somewhere in the underlying form of its gradually rounded shape
is an understanding that, despite being somewhat solitary
it sits in its own harbor