By Kathleen Lee

Bought a bus ticket to the wrong village
and the next morning wandered in circles
before finding the internet place where I read
in an email that my old friend P was dead
and all this time—a few years or more—
I’d imagined his healthy happy life,
his love of Scotch & his daughter,
his dark wit, the way he considerately
blew his cigarette smoke away from others—
while actually he’d been entangled in illness,
occupied with dying, and now—in a dingy
basement surrounded by boys slumped asleep
over their keyboards—I reckoned with how wrong
I was and when I emerged onto the dirt road
which I would never again walk in this life,
I couldn’t tell if the road was flat,
ascending, or descending and although the sun
was up and the air warm it felt like dusk
and it’s true I might never have
seen P again even were he alive
though I’m wrong about so much
(where I am, the correct way to pronounce
cesuo, how to live), a fact which
made me sad and irritated and free.

---

Kathleen Lee is editor of Blue Edge Books (www.bluedgebooks.com), a small poetry press.