Dear George (Ad Aged is for Me)

 

Dear George,

I want to write like you. Or a cross between you and Susan Stewart. 

So I will write to you.  

(Maybe off in a corner sometimes I will simply write like you, too, by copying down your actual sentences).

Why you? You ask (my imaginary world here).

Well, you’re the bell. The best. 

The best bell. Loud and clear. Simple. 

You’re the Liberty Bell and the clapper inside it. You’re the sun in William Stafford’s “Earth Dweller,” ‘rising like a gong.' You bring the reeling Malickian skies upon us with your exhausted, joyful, angry prose, and I have been dying to work up the courage to put it plainly, as you do. Your note is the bald and heartbreaking note of hope, that poetry's not really dead and doesn't have to come be what passes for "poetry" today. 

I echo the frustration, the stark bleak revelation of our culture's current state as well as the moments of profundity that are like watching you mother-hen chicks beneath your fatherly wings. 

Why now? You ask. I turned 40, I guess. But also, Kim Addonizio said the white flowers are for me. As in, your flowers. Your Ad Aged, it is for me.

STAY
by Kim Addonizio

So your device has a low battery & seems to drain faster each day.
Maybe you should double your medication.

You might feel queasy, but also as if the spatula flattening you to the fry pan
has lifted a little.

So your breath comes out scorched, so what.

Inside, trust me on this,
there’s a ribbon of beach by a lake,

in the sand, fragments of a fossilized creature resembling a tulip.

Back in the Paleozoic, online wasn’t invented yet
so everyone had to wander alone & miserable through the volcanic wastes

or just glue themselves to a rock hoping someone would pass by.

Now you can sob to an image of your friend a continent away
& be consoled.

Please wait for the transmissions, however faint.

Listen: when a stranger steps into the elevator with a bouquet of white
roses not meant for you,

they’re meant for you.

I’ll sign off in the words of the non-skeptical, hellish young people. Hear them in the rising tone of a question—a bewildered middle-aged woman asks—thinking of her father and our future—

Ty?

ILY?

Marilee