August 2021
Bio Note: I have lived around the States (New Orleans, central Pennsylvania, Phoenix and now Tucson, Arizona). I've been a poet, arts administrator, teacher, editor and translator. While in Pennsylvania, I trained in conflict resolution with the Mennonites and became a trained mediator specializing in diversity issues in education. I'm retired now. I have nine collections of poetry, most recently, In June the Labyrinth (2017), and a tenth, instead, it is dark, coming out in 2023.
Good Friend
I stand invisible on the water-stair.
H.D., “Good Frend”
At midnight under a high full moon I lowered myself into the water
of a lake lined with dark hulks of trees, glimmers of camps among them,
the lake sheened with light.
By then you hardly heard, losing each year more of your hearing
after illness cast you out of childhood’s ken. You’d modulate your voice,
but when you couldn’t lipread
in the dark, as that night, or swimming, wear hearing aids,
you froze in half-smile, stuck. I hadn’t seen you in ten years.
I didn’t know why you made
the trip to see me two days before your June wedding. Or who I was
to you. You remarked your soon-wife’s jealousy, though we overstepped
no boundaries. Desire’s glow
soon dulled. I swam out far, fearless of the night. You turned back,
held a towel as you waited on the dock, hid your face and joked:
I vant to drink your blood—
a goofy Dracula who bled whatever drops of romance
welled until we laughed at our odd friendship. Unbroken,
untendered.
©2021 Cynthia Hogue
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