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Dear Kier
I woke this morning wondering
if you’ve gone to the Celestial.
The last time I saw you,
we met under the gold four-faced clock in the main hall
at Grand Central Terminal.
You and me, Kier,
in New York City, southern transplants, writers,
hospice volunteers,
meeting in the temple of travelers
under a turquoise heaven
stippled with lights—
Seen from above by the Divine Horse;
the Hunter,
we must have appeared as spirits
among hundreds more wandering
inside a golden bowl.
*
We left the constellations behind
for seats at the U-shaped lunch counter of The Oyster Bar,
sandwiched between surface-dwellers hustling above us
on the sidewalks of 42nd and Park
and the trains below rushing,
like madness itself, through the tunnels.
We settled inside that white and blue tiled tomb, the walls unfazed
by the overload of acoustics,
the endless traffic of businessmen and tourists.
I once saw Joe DiMaggio there, an old man by then,
close to death,
with two friends on either side who took turns
wiping his chin.
*
Leaning in close, we ate chowder from thick white bowls.
You were in your sixties,
old enough to be my mother,
though working with the dying
erases the importance of things like age
in a friendship like ours
where connection can’t be quantified.
We talked about our patient, H.
We’d taken turns
ministering to him during his final months.
He told you his life had been too short.
He told me being an artist is “not glamorous! It’s pain-staking
and monotonous!”
You gave him massages,
we both sat with him through his hallucinations: dinosaurs, rocket ships, luggage
packed for a moonshot—
If they were hallucinations.
*
Do you remember his memorial service
held in an artist’s loft in the East Village?
And Sister Dementia,
the cross-dressing DJ from The Pyramid Club,
a diminutive, unassuming
person in the off-hours, with short dark hair and bangs, dressed in a blend-into-the-room
gray suit with a Nehru collar?
He stood alone by the baby-grand,
trembling a little,
and wept through his remembrances of their trips
to Montauk while H could still get around.
And the dancing—
How H loved to dance. The only time Sister D saw him smile.
“He told me he wanted to die with dignity.”
And Olivia,
the head nurse from the Unit,
assured Sister D H had gone that way.
*
I still have that copy you gave me of the children’s book you wrote:
Chester and Uncle Willoughby.
I go back to my favorite passage from time to time
where Chester asks Uncle Will,
“what if the world was made of nothing?”
and they explore all the edgeless, unending dark
such a world would be.
When I first read it, I felt a chill,
but now
it reminds me of dark matter, which we weren’t discussing
thirty years ago,
though it’s always been there,
like the coyotes,
as H might have said.
A language it took me thirty years to understand—
as we’d witnessed, many times,
the crossing
through those last moments
into the nothing we’ve forgotten
that opens up into everything.
Dear H,
Thirty years
since your ashes were scattered
in the wilds of Harpswell—
Thirty years
since the day before you died;
those blue-black scabs
on your nose and throat fell off—
You wanted them to be saved,
but the one from your throat
disappeared.
Your mother thinks
Troy ate it.
Would you have forgiven
your little Pomeranian
if you’d known?
I remember how she twirled
on her hind feet like a ballerina
around your thinning legs,
jumped into your arms
when you were still able to stand,
laid silent on your chest
when you were too sick to speak.
*
I fed you when you
could no longer lift a fork,
microwaved veal and green beans
from the Chelsea Trattoria,
cut up your food
as if you were a baby,
and you let me.
*
On this borrowed porch,
scent of summer pine, the inlet receding,
I read out loud the notes I kept back then
and find my own voice strange,
after all these years,
closer to my death.
Peak-In-Darien
I want to finish my work.
That’s what you said to Kier as you palmed a piece of clay
the color of Sheep’s Meadow in late summer.
You’d been blind for months,
but in the pitch-black
of your new world,
you saw a city, a white tower,
a park. Perhaps
it was as Keats wrote after reading George Chapman’s translation of Homer:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken…
In those last days, the city sang to you, and you were driven,
as if by something interstellar,
to build—
the same way Roy in Close Encounters madly sculpted a tower
out of his mashed potatoes—
You called out the colors—
Kier handed you the clay:
purple for a footbridge
above a stream,
deep green for endless meadows,
copper for a stone path through a ramble,
yellow for tulips
around a carousel—
All you had left were your hands and your drive—
and you got started—
We thought you weren't ready to go—
But you were.
My Last Visit With R.
As I was leaving
he called to me, “Hey!
Keep the faith!
I’ll see you downstairs!”
As if he were still that strapping
window-washer
scaling skyscrapers
in the years before
the ever-stewing pools
of Needle Park
were closed.
Never gone
his primal thirst
for wings —
Now tethered
to his own refuse.
he was getting close—
blind, bandaged,
tongue white
with thrush.
He extended his hand.
I held it.
I don’t think he knew who I was.
The Hydro-Tub
Above the mother tub
across the tender face
the patient movement of hands
aligned with the moment—
the temperature of time
inside an ocean—
a blue padded gurney
lowered
into warm water—
sweet as the womb—
Each patient leaves a silent echo—
without remark or sorrow,
The clock secured
above
the porcelain berth—
Fingers, knees, feet, elbows,
places rubbed the most in a life
peeling off in my hands.
I knew one day
it would be my heels
shedding their little snow,
the bones of my hands
loose
in their purses of skin.
Frances Richey is the author of three poetry collections: The Warrior (Viking Penguin 2008), The Burning Point (White Pine Press 2004), and the chapbook, Voices of the Guard, a collaboration with the Oregon National Guard and Clackamas Community College, published by the college in 2010. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, O, The Oprah Magazine, Gulf Coast, Salamander, Blackbird, and The Cortland Review, among others. She was the Barbara and Andrew Senchak Fellow at MacDowell for 2015-2016, a Finalist for the National Poetry Series in 2019, and a Finalist for the 2020 Pablo Neruda Prize. Her poems have been featured on NPR, PBS NewsHour and Verse Daily. Frances teaches an on-going poetry writing class at Himan Brown Senior Program at the 92NY in NYC where she is Poet-in-Residence.
Updated: Jul 8
The End of Something is Not Nothing
All I had to do: cross my eyes, unline
the composition book, strip the horizon
of its ink, and imagine you. I have
never licked salt from you like the deer
skirting the edge of my grandmother's orchard
on spindle legs. Tentative tongues lapping,
necks craned, they strain against the split rail fence.
Amidst the buzz of honey and the lips
of lady’s slipper, they savor the saline,
suddenly transformed away from their own desire.
Deceptive as the dollar store bars
of Ivory soap dangling from arthritic
branches, I know you taste like the sweet
bitter of windfall apples.
Small Dignities Beside the Gulf Station
Out of the heaving darkness, lit in the graceful passing of headlights; a wayside shrine. There, a raccoon sweet-faced as if sleeping. Her aspect pressed towards the heavens, she was swaddled in a teal and white striped towel.
Terry cloth so bright in the before dawn, the grass around her sprung glaring green. This was not an oil rag. This was not an old dish towel or shoddy beach blanket. She was shrouded straight from the linen closet.
Such small dignities rarely exist beside the Gulf station. The grounds spangled with broken bottles and discarded lottery tickets.
I think of her dark lashes resting on her cheeks. I think of her small black hands folded and her children now hopeful foundlings. I wonder if she got to gaze up at the moon through the maple leaves at least once.
Black Dwarf
Orion is just lying above the horizon. I’m tracing his belt
with my finger when you say you’re amazed,
all the stars still smoldering but already fallen.
We were unprepared for how quickly after dinner turns into dark.
We’re herding children and bikes through the night.
For an instant, my hand catches on yours,
a quick embarrassment. Parting at the corner,
we do not say goodbye. In the illuminated shadow boxes
of our homes, scenes of life in every window,
rich and contoured like the waning face of the moon,
the future will never come.
Kate Hubbard has been previously published in Thema, Alehouse, The Prague Revue, and 5AM and has work forthcoming in the New Ohio Review. She has an MFA in poetry from New England College and currently teaches creative writing to children in East Haven, CT where she lives with her family.
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