POEM
Last Days
We visit by phone as the morphine haze
retreats, late afternoon, most days.
Our mingled past is set against the pin-
hole lights of cars cruising the blacked-out streets:
we four in the college smoker popping No-Doz,
honors students carrying heavy course loads
tipped sideways by sex, one by one discarding
our virginities on the altar of inverse pride,
ironing our blouses with Peter Pan collars
to wear on dates with those 90-day Wonders,
ensigns in training for the Second World War
in the Business School across the Charles River.
We called ourselves the Unholy Four.
Whenever any three of us met on campus
we huddled to bray Austria! Russia! Prussia!
in unison. It came out sounding like Horseshit!
Post graduation one year, look at us:
my new husband atop your even newer
one's car singing the bawdy verses
of "Roll Me Over" in a drunken tenor
while the scandalized uncles and aunties
—it wasn't enough that you'd wed a Chinese—
wrung their hands. You drove off
trailing Just Married in two languages.
Now BJ is gone, and Hettie. You have, they say,
only days. It is my plan to go with you
as far as the border. I've been that far—
Did I come back from there morally improved?
Somehow better equipped to support you
this side of the douane and wave,
your two cats curled like commas beside you
as the barrier lifts and you drive on through?
Source: Poetry (October 2002).
This poem originally appeared in the October 2002 issue of Poetry.
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