Dear Friend(s)

Jeffery Sugarman

• Publisher: The Emma Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781912915187
• eBook ISBN: 9781912915194
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Animated by many different types of kinship, the poems in Dear Friend(s) explore webs of experience that wind between parents, extended families and friends. They will take readers back to powerful, often early influences, which result from relations of likeness and empathy as well as blood.
The long title poem is an elegy – to a specific Dear Friend, dead from AIDS in its earliest years. It's also an elegy for the loss of innocence and freedom of sexual expression that flowed generously in the 1970s and 80s, in the UK and in the US.

Dear Friend,

I am writing this	to you. No.
I am writing this	for us.
If you’re there	please listen.
No echoes.	No woofs—

it’s winter now

and the world’s shut down. Our half of it,

that is, or—here. Silence all around

but for the urge. Where are you?

Where—the fuck are you? (All of you.)

*

Which of the cats ambling in my garden’s warmth today

is you? Which hummock

your grave? What grass

shields those once-soft curls, the flesh?

In which hospital did you die, which room—

or was it hospice? Who wept

in that city of Presidents we loathed? I went

quiet: the escape—

it wasn’t from you.

Orpheus,

I’ve dared to look back.

*

For it’s how I wanted you—

in the photos; as in—

what I’d have said

if it weren’t all so terribly

hidden

or lost.

We bent our bodies

blindly—couldn’t imagine secrets

blooming like lesions. That spring,

as in any other year, fruit trees laden

with flowers, the bees crazed with hunger, some

falling like sharp tears—but innocence,

it really has nothing to do with this.

*

Dear Tom,

Your father won’t know you, won’t want to

the way I did. And him, I didn’t know him

either—except what he filled you with, what you became; and though he’d never admit it

filled your mother with the seed to rear up that beautiful trunk. Native, crimson—

you made a fire of me, more than any man I’d ever touched; and you were good

as a cool damp towel on fire.

*

Dear Abundance

It’s not the one photo I see, but accumulation

of ‘Events’—

The beginning

Other days

Many more of the same

I skim them in search of some reason

some face I remember—

like a glistening

of squid in sunlit water

at their sudden turning

of a season from sharp bright frost

into narcissus or a shower

first thing in the morning

of falling stars burning out.

I’m drowning in abundance

where a knowing grin, a smile,

turns me like a top spinning too quickly;

in my head a pile of photos too high

of you long ago—

and you weren’t gone.

The Photos folder is over-full

the hard drive still spinning

hours later—it can’t find you

either.

*

(the turn)

This isn’t a sonnet. (You knew what they were.)

Or even a song we’d have sung

badly—at the bar after work. But I’ve tried,

in the dark, and light, even the shower, early.

All this thinking: of abundance, absence,

for some potential. It’s spring, you know—April,

and all that harshness—still, I remain shrouded

in leaf mould. But brilliant

yellow flower-heads and red-tipped golden cups

to hold aloft.

*

(Sonnet)

Water fell wildly—white and icy-cold—

through the narrow cleft, scoured the mountain,

each mica ridge, fissured and split, revealed

a deeper stone which embraced the pour.

Its after-flow was a bed of shards, the grass

having died long ago. In sunlight, the torrent

shone, as if an old man’s beard—bristled,

grey and white, touched with darker hairs—rough

and irresistible as the younger lovers

of young men—until I wasn’t. How

can it be that at such altitude...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Other Titles from the Emma Press
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Between Dunes and Sea
• Vagus (The Wanderer)
• Dear Friend,
• Fireflies (Hudson River Valley)
• Gallery
• The Shepherd
• The Buck Deer
• Earth
• Lessons in Navigation
• Lost Sonnet-for Julienne
• Animal Etudes
• Ascent to Orchids in the Morning
• Acknowledgements
• About the Poet