Dear Almost

A Poem

Matthew Thorburn

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9780807164334
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Dear Almost is a book-length poem addressed to an unborn child lost in miscarriage. Beginning with the hope and promise of springtime, poet Matthew Thorburn traces the course of a year with sections set in each of the four seasons. Part book of days, part meditative prayer, part travelogue, the poem details a would-be father's wanderings through the figurative landscapes of memory and imagination as well as the literal landscapes of the Bronx, Shanghai, suburban New Jersey, and the Japanese island of Miyajima.
As the speaker navigates his days, he attempts to show his unborn daughter "what life is like / here where you ought to be / with us, but aren't." His experiences recall other deaths and uncover the different ways we remember and forget. Grief forces him to consider a question he never imagined asking: how do you mourn for someone you loved but never truly knew, never met or saw? In candid, meditative verse Dear Almost seeks to resolve this painful question, honoring the memory of a child who both was and wasn't there.

Three Deer Beneath
the Autumn Moon

Dusk in August—
which means nearly
nine o’clock here, an hour
south of home, deep
in the heart of central
Jersey—and the deer
step out to graze
the backyards. They tear
each yellowy red
tulip cup, munch up
rhododendrons
and azaleas. Fifty
years of new houses
have eaten into
their woodland, leaving
only this narrow strip
of trees along the trickly
stream that zigzags
between Route 9
and Lily’s mom’s
backyard. The deer rise
from the mist, hooves
clicking on asphalt, a doe
and a buck, his antlers
like a chandelier.
Sometimes a doe and two
fawns. Or else we see
just the white flags
of their tails bobbing away
into the dark. In theory
the DNR should come
catch them, let them go
where it’s still
forest, still possible to live
as they were meant to.
But these days
there’s no money
for that. And people keep
leaving out old bread,
rice, stale cookies, or else
plant more delicious flowers.
“Mei banfa,”
my mother-in-law says:
Nothing can be done.
Seeing them in
the distance—that distance
we can’t close
without them shying
and turning and skittering
down Dickinson Lane
or bounding
over a backyard fence—
I try to imagine
they’re messengers
come back to tell us
their stories, any news
of the lost or what
comes next, though
if they could say
anything, they would
probably say, Go away.

This is the story of
what’s missing, a space
one can see only
because we’ve filled in
everything around it:
keyhole I peer through
to what I can’t hold,
little hole in my heart
where the air leaks out,
little no more, no luck or way
or how. I write one
as if that distance
softens the ache, makes it
easier to know this
hurt, as if one meant
something other than
a person who’s alone,
who’s lonely. One means
I’m by myself. This one
is me. Autumn now

and I wish I could read you
these old Chinese poems
I love, which rarely use
the word I (or Wo, to say it
in Chinese: “Wo ai ni”
means I love you,
which I do). So it’s only
because of an understanding
built up over hundreds
of years, the common warp
in which the weft
of each new poem
was woven, that anyone
who reads these poems—
whether in the original Chinese
like Lily’s mom or
the English translations
I get by on—and so hears

the last yellow leaves
clinging to the black branch
creak and moan
as the wind sweeps through

or sees how

a swan circles the slate-gray lake,
searching for her mate

knows these poems
are really about Lao Wen
and his own inner weather,
his griefs and worries, heart-
break, illness, someone dear
but far from him
he will never see again
even though he hardly ever
shows his face in them.

Dear almost—

Dear keyhole I squint through
to see that other life—

Pinpoint of light
that life revolves around—

Dear heart I can’t hear
anymore, alone
in the woods. I walk back
into the past, last spring’s
leaves crumbling
underfoot. It’s September,
deep in the season of decay
and forgetting,
but I want to hold on

to everything. Look
how that gray squirrel
socks away acorns
to make it through winter.
How does he remember
where they’re all hidden?
And above us, delicate
brown nests woven
into high-branching Vs, dark
against the stark pale sky.
Most birds make new ones
each year, so these are left

to rot. They’ll be gone
by spring when the birds return.
They’re closing up shop.
They’re packed and prepped
for the long caravan south.
How do they do it?
“Get started,” my father
would say. “Then keep

going.” This morning
I don’t want to remember,
it’s not in keeping
with the season, which repeats
what’s closest
to hand like a mockingbird:
let go, let go. In this cold
field I keep turning over
stones, looking for

what? And when I stop
to answer it snags me,
this hurt like a burr
hooked in the haunch
of a deer: I carry it with me
all day. I think of you still,

so still, and not there anymore
in that dark room,
though I ought to know
better, though I feel
the tiny light I cup
deep inside me gutter
and go out. “It’s strange,”
Lily says when
I come home, “and un-
satisfying, isn’t it?
To hurt like this for someone

we never met?” She turns
off the water, wipes her hands
with the yellow towel.
“But here we are, hurting for
someone we never met.”
I think what we’ve lost

is imagination—the soft glimmer
of possibility, that hum
in the belly (this part I don’t say
out loud), the lightness
I remember feeling each day
during that little while
when sarcasm and irony
and even the last bit of bitterness
had all fallen away
so that it felt like gravity
had been dialed down just for us.

Would music scare off deer? “Works
on bad boys,” says Harry Chu.
At the Wawa on Wickatunk
Road, Harry cranks up the classics
to keep teens from hanging out
out front. “Loiterers.” They used to
drop cigarette butts, soda cans,
crinkly bits of shiny cellophane.
“Bad for business.” But now it’s me

who lingers, windows down, foot
on the brake, to hear the wavery sigh
of the erhu over the rush of passing
cars, snow sliding off pine boughs
as “...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Once in Early Spring
• The Light that Lasts All Summer
• Three Deer Beneath the Autumn Moon
• The Day Winter Gives Way
• Notes and Acknowledgements