Unanswered Letter by Tess Gallagher

Tess Gallagher

Unanswered Letter by Tess Gallagher

T.

There are letters I have to write. There are letters I want to receive. Wasn’t it Svetlana Alliluyeva who said, “The one good thing about not seeing you is that I can write you letters”?

Unanswered Letter

Tess Gallagher

Your silence is leaning toward judgment.

Yesterday I bragged, writing to calm

my paranoid friend, that I never assume

the worst when my pals don’t write. Now

assuming the worst, I think what I must have

done, or not done. Surely some recognition

will brand the door of my house, or

rich attention flutter down.

How natural, in silence, to credit delay

with intention, like the word

oar

insisting on water. The need also to

advise the self around exaggeration,

i.e., “nobody loves me,” because nothing

is

coming back, and, next to nothing, not

to act like a transistor radio left on into

the night, voices singing like an ear

baffled by the rain, or someone refused

because they think so.

Those others you loved elsewhere, you miss

what they haven’t said. They belong

to some permission to go on as more

than yourself, a clarity that adds you back

to all you cast off, as when

you want to be the good light of a lamp

scanning the firmament, or rain- its pleasure

with an open boat.

So what is unanswered keeps you coming back

to yourself, telling you what you wanted

only when it didn’t come, having now

to make up this difference.

Even moments you think empty, the world

doesn’t stop speaking – the windshield

blurred suddenly by a sighting of gravestones,

before you are driven

through the underpass.

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