You always called late and drunk, <br />your voice luxurious with pain, <br />I, tightly wrapped in dreaming, <br />listening as if to a ghost. <br /> <br />Tonight a friend called to say your body <br />was found in your apartment, where <br />it had lain for days. You'd lost your job, <br />stopped writing, saw nobody for weeks. <br />Your heart, he said. Drink had destroyed you. <br /> <br />We met in a college town, first teaching jobs, <br />poems flowing from a grief we enshrined <br />with myth and alcohol. I envied the way <br />women looked at you, a bear blunt with rage, <br />tearing through an ever-darkening wood. <br /> <br />Once we traded poems like photos of women <br />whose beauty tested God's faith. 'Read this one <br />about how friendship among the young can't last, <br />it will rip your heart out of your chest!' <br /> <br />Once you called to say J was leaving, <br />the pain stuck in your throat like a razor blade. <br />A woman was calling me back to bed <br />so I said I'd call back. But I never did. <br /> <br />The deep forlorn smell of moss and pine <br />behind your stone house, you strumming <br />and singing Lorca, Vallejo, De Andrade, <br />as if each syllable tasted of blood, <br />as if you had all the time in the world. . . <br /> <br />You knew your angels loved you <br />but you also knew they would leave <br />someone they could not save.<br /><br />Philip Schultz<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-silence-2/
