"The Letters" by Jack Ridl

In honor of National Poetry month and what I have affectionately come to know as Poetry Blitz Day, a poem:

---

This week the letter from my mother

is a half-page long, the handwriting

shaking its way across the paper.

She was proud of her penmanship.

Each loop had been perfect, each

word aligned with the next, each T

crossed as if she used a level.

It was her elegance, a dignity

she held between thumb and

forefinger. "Not much to say,"

she writes. "This room is a room.

They will move me to another."

She always writes on Friday.

"Good way to end the week,"

our years connected from there,

upper left corner, to here centered

perfectly. She would fill two pages

with her crisp judgment of a book,

a movie, descriptions of her times

swimming, dancing, going

to hear the "news lady" talk about

the week's events, how she'd done

on the quiz, and what "The Colonel"

had ordered everyone to do: "Feed

the birds! Clean up the leaves

in front of your place! Support

the troops!" Now she writes,

''I'm tired."

My wife is sleeping on the couch.

It's late afternoon. I watch her

breathing, start to count the breaths,

wonder why, stop. The cat dashes

by. Bees hum in the bee balm.

I pour a cup of coffee, steady it

with milk, stir until it turns from

coal to caramel, the steam rising,

the long evening beginning

to spread itself outside the window.

I look across the room, notice

on the shelf our Scrabble game,

think of the tiles, each letter singular,

able to take its place within a word.

---

from Practicing to Walk Like a Heron

Wayne State University Press