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20 YEARS GONE
by Jennifer Phelps
Originally published in Hot Air Quarterly, Fall 2011

What I remember
a cap of tight dyed curls
an impossible strawberry blonde
at your unconfessed age

pink-framed bifocals
and basement pipes hung heavy with thousands
of bright blouses

your small body made hard
by sadness and
vigorous walking on the steep
streets of San Francisco

tall glass cylinder filled with miniature chocolate bars
and that painstakingly stitched petit point Seurat
proudly frozen in maddeningly
meticulous detail
on your living-room wall

I remember trinkets of ornately carved cinnabar
roses
foggy mornings and
too many stray cats fed faithful

What I cannot forget

late nights
that stretched long and promising with
giddy giggles and shared stories
giving way to a strained and unutterable silence
as I inevitably began to acquire the
trappings of adulthood

and then you were lost to me
stubbornly behaving as if
it was I who was lost to you

I wish I could ask you things

ask you if you were always given
to self-destructive urges
like the strawberry allergy
that spawned in you
an irrepressible craving for the
illicit fruit

you reportedly went on binges
eating one heaping basketful after another
until you were red-mouthed and
miserable with hives

I want to ask you if you
thought I could not see
past your garrisons of levity
and shunned idleness
to the lonely void inside
where could have dwelt
contentment, if not joy

After all, beauty surrounded you

you who were so skilled at creating
intricate, beautiful things
with your doorknob knuckles
and your wooden looms
humming with life like a beehive
birthing placemats, runners

all rashly sold at your shocking moving sale
when you forcibly shed the exoskeleton
of your full but empty existence for pennies on the dollar
sold the house at 19 Hazelwood Avenue and everything in it
to start anew in the
sticky paradise of Honolulu

you cast off all your beloved possessions then
the parquet-topped breakfast table
those tiny silver spoons from
faraway places
the bedroom set you
saved for a year to buy
as a young woman

Did those things cling to you
like an oil slick to matted feathers,
weighing you down,
rendering you flightless?

or did you consider yourself unworthy
the sale another
byproduct of your self-condemnation?

I wonder…

What is it
you would say to me now
if I could ask you who you are?

So many questions

answers now lost to me
like the sensation of your
glittering brooches crushed
into my breastbone
as you hugged me too tightly
with your ferocious, awkward affection

and of course you loved
and lived
but so painfully and with bitter reproach

so that when your body
let you down in the end –
Lou Gehrig’s disease stealing
first your speech, then legs, lungs –
you catalogued
that disappointment
with the spiteful satisfaction of true
self-loathing
leaving me an awful parting gift
of slurred dagger words
on your lonesome hospital deathbed:

“Don’t waste your time on me.”

I was of course too young to tell you
even in the face of that cruel dismissal

how much I loved you

how they are your small, graceless feet
that slip into my size six shoes

how, as the great chasm of
loneliness threatens to
engulf me, as it did you,

I, too, aspire to create things of beauty
with these diminutive hands, so like yours
though not with busy looms
and brightly colored threads
but with a pen and paper,
paint and brush,
still

the heart of a weaver beating
always beating
within my chest.

© 2011 by Jennifer Phelps

Jennifer Phelps

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