What really got me
wasn’t my own dark days
but the rainy-morning call from a friend:
her ex came over to say goodbye to her and the girls,
the two girls he’d helped raise for years,
who were now old enough to see and say to their mom
he was the closest thing to a father they’d ever had,
who wrote him letters for what was too hard to say,
letters they didn’t show their mom,
letters he promised her he would read but not just yet
because it might break him.
He came for lunch and stayed for dinner.
He looked so happy, like he wanted to stay forever,
but it was already 100° in Arizona
and he wanted to get ahead of the heat
so he was leaving town in ten days.
He used to come over to make dinner every day.
He used to always take a nap at 3 p.m.
and everything was like clockwork for him
except the wildness of love and family
and then the fight and failure to save his department,
his job: Foreign Languages eliminated.
It’s raining hard outside as she tells me
he seemed different, less in control, more—
“weary?” I offer, and yes that’s it.
She told him she’d been in custody court for a year
and he said he was sorry, that was always her worst fear.
She said the amazing part was she wasn’t afraid anymore.
She simply looked herself in the eye every morning
while brushing her teeth and vowed:
I will fight that motherfucker till the day I die.
Maybe they could have made it work
now that they’d both changed.
Maybe she should have tried harder.
But the new job was great—
so much better, even—
and so he had to go.
“Academia will break your heart,”
my friend says, and tells me for the first time
that after I left Tennessee eight years ago
(we’d both arrived a year earlier, freshly divorced,
witnesses to each other’s new lives and loves)
she’d drive from one end of town to the other,
the rich part, the poor part, campus, downtown,
the commercial strip, the road to the waterfall,
back and forth, up and down, and tell herself:
This is where you live now:
on a plateau on the edge of the mountains.
This is it; this is your life.
Every few minutes
the drizzle swells
into a hard rain.
I wipe my eyes.
I am all of them,
and we come from
the same stock,
my friend and I.
It has taken us
a long time
to find a family.