It was five a. m., the papers say
when you slipped away in your sleep.
It must have been a quiet departure
unlike you, who were seldom at a loss for
words. I'm damn sorry I missed your funeral,
sorrier to have missed your conversation
all these years.

Not that you were unquiet--
you held it in and wept, if you wept,
in a place apart (not unlike the rest of us either
wearing charity like a millstone). I often found
you behind your old Underwood at the paper
banging away with two fingers at that old devil
language. I learned from you never to use the
word rue or to put a comma at the end of a line,
learned to value some common truths, like the
way you always asked, "How you feelin'?"
and probably meant it. I miss you no more
today than during ten years silence
though the thought of you grows hollow.

You were a sociable man. I found it easy to love you
and knew you loved me because I knew you to hate me
once. I had seen a weakness you couldn't abide--
the circumstance no longer matters, but the truth
can't be left out. Like the memory of torn pride

whatever we carry of others in us, stays.

[Published in New Texas 1998, January 1999]