Home > Poetry Magazine > I Had Just Hung Up from Talking to You

Poetry Magazine

POEM
RELATED CONTENT Discover this poem's context and related poetry.

I Had Just Hung Up from Talking to You

By Jessica Greenbaum Jessica Greenbaum

I had just hung up from talking to you

and we had been so immersed in the difficulty

you were facing, and forgive me,

I was thinking that as long as we kept talking,

you in your car in the parking lot of the boys’ school

as the afternoon deepened into early evening,

and me in the study, all the books around

that had been sources of beauty to us,

as long as we stayed in the conversation

padded with history like the floor of the pine forest,

as long as I thought out loud, made a joke

at my own expense, you would be harbored in that exchange,

but the boys were leaving the track

and after we hung up I looked out the window

to see the top of the bare January trees spotlit to silvery red,

massive but made from the thinnest

twigs at the ends of the branches at the ends of the limbs

they were waving and shining in a light

like no other and left only to them.

Source: Poetry (July/August 2012).

Biography

Jessica Greenbaum’s first book, Inventing Difficulty (Silverfish Review Press, 1998), won the Gerald Cable Prize. Her second book, The Two Yvonnes (2012), was chosen by Paul Muldoon for Princeton’s Series of Contemporary Poets. She is the poetry editor for upstreet and lives in Brooklyn.

Continue reading this biography