Samuel Washington Allen Prize Honorable Mention, selected by Lloyd Schwartz
Kintsukuroi
Dear Andrea, this isn’t a letter
But I thought I’d write it anyway,
To let you know it’s been a cold spring,
Days so full of rain an ark
Seems a reasonable investment.
The curve of every cul-de-sac
An imminent harbor. Your house
Sits by a lake made by a glacier
Retreating, the water ready to spill
Over the edges of its cup. It’s too warm
Even though we can’t always tell;
The ice at the poles is breaking up
Badly, screaming in the street.
Floods are gathering, preparing signs
We see as we drive by, continue talking
About politics, whether being vegan
Is good or bad, how much we’d miss cake.
My son had an existential crisis
After we told him to turn off his game,
Philosophy filling in the gaps, what’s the point
He asked, if it’s all random, why am I me,
It brought him to tears, angry ones
We were not supposed to notice,
Not even to offer a tissue, louche like a rose
In August, like any peony after its first bloom
I suppose, if I could grow peonies,
If I took the time. Your daughter is in karate,
Like that’s a state or a country, in Karate,
Where belts define your caste, where blocks
Of wood exist to be cut by a child’s hand
But not burned. I think she has become an expert
At hitting, breaking things in two, left and right,
Right and wrong, before and after.
Was she at your funeral? I didn’t see her
But I can’t say I was looking; I didn’t want her
To be there with you lying in state like a duchess
Of a county that was richer than the Crown.
It wasn’t you and it was. How’s that for philosophy?
Ambivalence is the best word, it encompasses
So much and still sets itself apart, the candidate
In the crowded field that the voters will coalesce around
Like bees, like oil droplets finding each other, sperm
Seeking the egg, the mother-ship.
Mothers are locked
In cages, babies are locked in cages,
Opiates, fentanyl, crystal meth make cages.
Skeleton keys are hard to come by—
Do you think they are made of ivory?
We never talked about this. Not cages
And poems that make cages for cages
Or set suffering, cut by hand,
In a ring, a parure. You would not have liked a collar
Of cabochon rubies that set off your scar,
You would not have liked to know
Your husband cries at night after the littlest
Has gone to sleep, not asking for you.
The State House is ready to throw us under the bus
But the monitors are required to check
No one is there.
A digression—I miss your face
Laughing, ruddy after gin, how we sat together
In your car and talked about the ruination of medicine,
How it ruined us, how spiteful we were
And how kind. There are hurricanes
With names already, Nestor and Opie,
Priscilla the name of Jesus’s disciple,
A childless wife. Did she have hair as yellow as yours,
As narcissus, do you think she poured out
The rough red with a liberal hand?
I do, but I don’t think she wasted a drop.
You might want to know how miscarriages are criminal
Now, depending on where the car stops.
There’s no train along the coast, though we all agree
It would be a good idea, as long as there’s a dining car
Elegant with white linen and candlelight,
Candles floating like camellias in water,
The old light flickering across faces,
The velvet lined roof, making us all beautiful
Or interesting but not both. There’s so much to tell you
Except possibly you know everything now
Or you know nothing matters very much.
I’ve written a book you’ll never read,
You would have liked it, I’m fairly certain;
You would have recognized the nights we were on-call
And the nurses were impatient that we didn’t just say Yes,
Yes, yes, yes, Molly Blooms for every page,
Every patient who could not sleep for dreaming,
For the blankets that could not keep out cold, ghosts,
Torment. We were dozy, dull, half-drunk
With exhaustion, with cortisol plummeting
At 4 am, the hour our bodies have chosen
To be preparation for the grave; answering
Any question was impossible, not yes, not no,
Quelling the anger at being called. Fury:
We had signed up for it. You remember that,
Wherever you are, the way you recall
Writing your name for the pill, your hand
Cupping the back of your son’s head
As he nursed, avoiding the trembling
Of his open fontanelle.
I thought I saw you
At the market today, a blonde woman
In a summer blouse, intent, planning
What you would buy. It wasn’t you,
Conjured up by this unletter, a word
I’ve made just for you, recognizable
To everyone who’s ever told a patient
To write a letter they don’t mean to send,
Sign it, use sealing wax in a rosebud blob
If you must. Measles may destroy us all,
Guns printed off in the family room,
Without the regular hum of dot matrix
Like a heart murmur; I’ve written about zombies
So many times you’d think I loved horror
When actually I only care about consuming
Brains, understanding their dribble, the slosh
Of their mallow in syrup against the skull,
A Viking loving-cup. I have a model
In my office, an enormous paperweight,
A monster if anyone’s head were made
That weight, cerebrum dense as lead,
Skull of glass. My favorite delusion,
A body transmuted to complete fragile clarity,
Poor bedeviled Charles the Beloved
Had iron rods sewn into his clothes,
An exoskeleton he thought would protect
Him. I’m sure no one told him iron
Shatters glass more easily than an open palm.
Caesura, a breath, the synaptic cleft holds everything
As long as I keep writing this, you are alive.
As long as I keep writing this, you keep dying,
A memory fighting with a fantasy, the post-modern
Limbo of an atheist afraid to admit it,
Calling myself agnostic because it reminds me
Of gnosis, the word round like a cherry
In my mouth, sweet-fleshed around a stone.
How dear it is, how dear you are, with me
And without substance—how have we all gone on
Without you and how could we fail?
I don’t know what it means, that you’ve left
And I’m still giving advice about how to write
A poem, a reading list that doesn’t explain how to
Look at the side of the road when you drive,
Watch for a deer, its neck angled to true north,
Crumpled like a sheet after a nightmare,
See if you can read the code the rain makes
Streaking down your window; are you accomplished
As AI would be? It’s just a question,
Not a qualification. Write a poem anyway,
The dress the mice sewed for Cendrillon,
Stitches tiny, the taint of vermin on the silk,
The scent of her mother’s skin mixed with worms,
Mixed with ambergris and jasmine, verbena
Sharp, a paring knife.
So many incidents,
How they’re packed in like crooked teeth,
Shark’s teeth in rows, easily broken off;
A second sand on the beach, the ocean’s refuse.
One summer I read a book about a girl
And her empty, hot August, about lying
In the grass and staring up at the white sky.
I tried it and the blades were distracting,
Prickling against my cheeks, my calves.
I couldn’t achieve anything like peace
Or the equilibrium of boredom, the skin
Of a pudding. I was waiting the whole time
For instructions; I couldn’t have fallen asleep
For the life of me. The book was boring,
The inverted tea-cup above me was boring too,
But resonant. I still know that feeling,
That remove, that is not meditation
Nor its seed.
I went away and came back.
You went away and did not. Have not.
Will not. Dear Andrea, there is no way
To end this, to finish the poem
That you have already written. Decisions
Are rendered, punctuated, complete.
Be careful of broken glass in the street,
I told my daughter and she asked,
What other kind is there? Is it whole
Or broken, once it shatters? I’ll wait.
I’ll wait a long time for an answer.
I won’t expect to hear from you again.
Daisy Bassen is a poet and child psychiatrist who graduated from Princeton University’s Creative Writing Program and completed her medical training at The University of Rochester and Brown. Her work has been published in McSweeney’s, Smartish Pace, and [PANK] among other journals. She lives in Rhode Island with her family.