May 26, 2020

your poems, they multiply

Sherry said this, on the voice memo I listened to on the way back from the post office.
It had taken me five days to mail the packages. They sprawled like teenagers,
inconveniently, taking up the real estate at the end of a table where a fruit bowl
should have been. When I played the message, I heard my friend take a sip of her coffee
before reading me the poem she’d read in the voice memos she’d sent to two other people.
I imagined them, listening as I was, their gaze turning toward the sound of Sherry’s voice.
I pictured the bundles I’d left in Lincolnville, bound for Canada. I imagined the house 
at the end of the road I’d just passed - Little Harbor Lane - and the woman who might be
sitting on her porch, cup raised, as she watched fog slither over the bay. I pictured us all,
singly and multiplied, colliding in equal reverie, the shapes of us filling in the new world.