Love Letter to a Friend I Cannot Reach
By Keetje Kuipers
Sometimes, when I can’t remember who I am,
I return to that café on the Place des Vosges
where years ago, in another life, you plunked lumps
of sugar into my espresso as if willing the cup
to overflow. But I was the one overfull, not caring
who saw me cry for my one true self—that self being imaginary,
lost somewhere in a future I could no longer see. Your
great uncle—who spoke no English, a Jew who had survived
and stayed, all his friends from the Résistance long dead—
fumbled the small square napkins like a useless deck
of tarot before pressing them to my face. Even remembering
now the cuffs of his tan trench coat as they gently bumped
against my cheeks, it is still difficult to remind myself
that the uncertainty of living in time is defined not by what we
cannot know of the world but what we cannot know
of ourselves. So am I finally ready to tell you that your hair was a dark
cloud destroying itself on your shoulders? That I’ve loved you
always from the precise distance you’ve required?
That the pin I bought you of a head turned towards
its own twisted, wind-wrought tresses has become in my mind
these twenty years later nothing less than your own visage, temples
now silvered to the metal’s same dull shine, strands
of which I still long to tangle in my hands? Someone else
once explained to me that she loved me in spite of who I was.
I do not know her anymore, if I ever did. But you and I
sat there in those curved bamboo chairs all the Paris
bistros have, and I cried until my face was as bare
and charmless as your favorite bar in broad daylight,
no flickering candles or wine to soften its inherent need.
Why do I go back to such a moment? What comfort
can I find now that Uncle Willy, too, is dead and I have not
seen your own sweet face in years? The separation
is unbearable. I am begging myself to taste the sugar, to keep
alive for you the one I thought I’d lost until we can meet again.
Poet, writer, teacher, and editor Keetje Kuipers is the author of Beautiful in the Mouth (2010), The Keys to the Jail (2014), and All Its Charms (2019), all from BOA Editions. Keetje’s work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Narrative, VQR, American Poetry Review, Orion, Kenyon Review, and The Believer, among many others. The recipient of several national fellowships and awards, Keetje is currently the Editor of Poetry Northwest and the Deputy VP of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at the National Book Critics Circle. She is currently at work on her fourth book of poems.