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Not one single further sorrow, and: [Let’s say you forgot me]
Not one single further sorrow
here, where this morning three horses nuzzled at the fence near the gravel road, their chestnut heads and necks glistening—
here, where I could forget sorrow and how the young girl from our class that summer gave up on herself, and the news spread quickly.
Or, if not a forgetting, a diminishment—the way the horizon across the field of grasses and bachelor’s buttons softens its line to a fringe of blossoms and stems. [End Page 95]
[Let’s say you forgot me]
Let’s say you forgot me— no, not forgot: were unable to reach, one of us out of the country, say, me this time writing in France. I put down line after line, shapes anyone could make something out of, black ink on cream paper, waiting for you to call. Your phone, my phone, somebody’s phone isn’t working. My thoughts are growing remote, and the words come to me in a language I can’t translate. Weeks pass, as weeks will do. My handwriting becomes illegible and the ink is starting to fade. [End Page 96]
Susan Laughter Meyers is the author of My Dear, Dear Stagger Grass, which received the Cider Press Review Editor’s Prize and will be published this autumn. Her collection Keep and Give Away won the South Carolina Poetry Book Prize. Her poems have appeared recently in Southern Poetry Review, 2013 Poet’s Market, and North Carolina Literary Review.
Footnotes
This title and the line quoted in the poem that follows are from If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, translated by Anne Carson.
