Remind me of your affliction.

I’d like a chronological exhibit
of the disorders leading up to our
conversation, like your old driver’s licenses
arranged in that one thin pocket of leather,
the phases of your hair, the splay
of your youth. Your current
eyes distorted by lenses, you’re speaking clearly,
louder than the drugs prescribed.

What I want to know about is the frenzy.

Sure, I can picture you
on Christmas Eve needing Mass
to last as long as a bottle of wine, but
I don’t get the religion.

Explain Jesus.

Talking with you was like opening an empty drawer.

Talking with you was like emptying an open drawer.
My hands overflowing with garments out-dated, or never worn.
What do you call that thing a priest wears
around his neck? The scarf of a priest …

Explain how we’re so immediately alive.

And how far can I carry the thought of you
when already the snow won’t hold me.

Even rosaries get tired.

And you’re not thinking me,
you’re just imagining my dead sisters.

You say you want to feel
the words.

You just want to live in Boston
with the painter Martha McCollough.

Sure, I can imagine the thought
of an easel, the idea
of thick paint.

But I want you to explain it simply, clinically.
Because now that I’ve thought about it, what
doesn’t begin with love and death and end
in loneliness?

I’m only now beginning to answer your letter:
Remind me of your affliction