Kelly R. Samuels

           after David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress with occasional phrases from Kate

I do agree that a view of the water is best.

Preferably a large body of water, one with tides.

It eases something clamoring somewhere, possibly

inside. Certainly. I’m not sold on the burning

of houses, though fires along the shore as a way

to signal to someone out there—beyond—

sounds sound. Sounds about right if I were to find

myself in a similar world, grieving. All the losses.

Yesterday I said to someone that we don’t talk

of the other smaller deaths nearly enough: those

that come with the years and don’t involve

obituaries. The first genuine friend who moved

away with his parents. The girl who left off

texting and walked by in the hall as if

we were strangers. The man we wrote to

weekly—long emails like handwritten letters—

who, then, wrote: I can’t, anymore. Sometimes

those spaces are filled by others. Other times:

not. It sure seemed as if you had no one

to fill that space, even if you went looking

for near a decade—across continents, across

oceans, across this familiar river.

Rivers do flow south and the madness does run

on. And I’m not sure russet is really a color

either. We wish to tell someone of what we can

do, now. So, maybe, the page, is best, it being

our sole option. Doubtless. On my honor. Well.

As a matter of fact, Cassandra’s life is largely

comprised of either/or. Either a c or a k.

Killed by either this person or that. Buried here

or there. As you often asked, What do any of us

ever truly know? I know that I miss some of those

people who have gone the way of, still.

And that I have kept Wolf’s novel Cassandra

with my notes in the margins all these eons, all

these different lives I have lived in one or two

or three different places.