The Letter

I got a letter from someone I didn’t want to hear from

who accused me of things I didn’t want to be accused of.

It seems she’d fround religion and her faith was

like daylight savings; it required her to set the clock back far into

the past to where it intersected with my own memory and caught the two of us there, suspended like ants in amber.

My own path back to that moment was like a twisted copper wire,

it turned back on itself, was thin in places, became knots and webs

circling over itself.

I had no fear of tracing its tangle back to the thing she accused me of,
but something in me arose automatically to her accusation

and I arrived in time at the office of the abortionist.

Nothing of that waiting room hid from me

I looked on that eighteen year old boy, sitting under fluorescent lights

waiting and pretending to focus on a stray Time magazine.

Nothing was happy in me there, no feeling of power or coercion

no sense of getting anything I wanted and she did not

just a penetrating sense of failure and worry

as I waited on the side of the door that led out into the summer sunshine

and she on the other side which led only to its locked rooms.

If her faith, in that moment when she appeared at the door
groggy, defeated, and sad, was with us it was a ghost.

It may have spoken to her, it may have roared in her ear.

I did not hear it and she did not speak of it.

Later, she told me the shaking hand of the old

doctor, his rheumy eyes and cold breath,

had taken not one but all future children from her womb.

Yet now she lives in the suburbs

of Atlanta with

three babies and a bible.

And I remember the little black flowers on her dress,

the tatooed skull on her ankle,

the sunshine on the parking lot that day,

more than I care for her peace of mind.