This is not a sonnet
but if it were, I’d number it 20/200, because I’m legally blind.
I see through a London fog as I write this poem. I swam
through my haze on 8/31/7. When you died at 39 nearly
18 years after you missed dinner to give birth to me. Nine
months before Queen Elizabeth’s coronation on 6/2/53. You loved
her corgis – smirked at her hats. “She was more dowdy at 21
than I’d be if I lived to 104,” you said, “I’ll be lucky if I make
it to 40. But I know good hats when I see them.” You
were as good at math as you were gifted at haberdashery.
Before your 4th decade, Type 1 diabetes, that sickeningly
sweet clown, wore you down. I almost drowned trying to bring
you back. Yet I clearly saw your deadened gaze. After so
much pain, even with the corgis and hats, you didn’t want
to look back. You were seeing sights I hadn’t yet seen.
Hindsight is too late, but delicious: the fortune
cookie I eat with your ghost.
In Provincetown
It’s not that you’re not quite the vamp – walking our poodle, holding her rhinestone leash, singing “This Lady Is a Tramp.” Even the most
deadened mortician would drink you in with enlivened eyes. You’re more delicious than a beignet. Better than the ones we scarfed
down that night at the Café Du Monde with the ghost of Blanche DuBois. “I’m so happy to be out of that play,” she said. Ghosts
are your BIFFS. You applauded when my dead lover, now, a robin, singing out-of-tune, woke us up at 5 a.m. “Angels
often sing off=key,” you said. Watching you strut on Commercial Street, I don’t want to hear the arias of tone-deaf spirits. I want
to eat gritty, greasy, fried, unangelic belly clams with you.
Kathi Wolfe’s work has appeared in Gargoyle, Poetry Magazine and other publications. Her poetry collection The Porpoise In The Pink Alcove is forthcoming in 2024.