Letter from the Other Side of Halfway

Dear ­­­­Bob: In one of my former incarnations
as a starving, family-less, twenty-something
grad student, well before the advent of emails
& texting, when handwritten sentiments
on stationery were still in vogue, I certainly
sent my share of “Dear Bob Letters.”
The recipients thereof, on the whole
a far cry from being remotely “Bob-like,”
included a number of real posers, some of whom
now strut & crow on Facebook like the hoary
roosters they clearly are. Too many others are dead,
several by their own hands, even—
a stone-cold statistic I grapple with, sorting
through surreal, a posteriori details by day
& at night chasing after their egotistical ghosts
in my dreams, always with the conviction
that some message for me yet lurks
in the dry lakebeds & sunless recesses of the Nether,
a realm to which the tips of my toes & then some
are no strangers. Manning the paned threshold
between me & my secrets is only this pinkish-
translucent swath of chiffon, which I’m afraid
doesn’t leave much to the imagination,
so, consider yourself warned, Amico Mio!
Against our current backdrop of imbecilic
plutocrats, political sycophants & psychopaths
bearing assault rifles, hardly to be tempered by
the incidental, decent soul, it wouldn’t take
a discerning eye long to know me better
than I know myself, which is just about the only thing
I know anymore… In my attempts to locate myself,
I’ve often looked to nature—these days, it’s among
the imposing Sequoias we glorify here in the Northwest,
along with the cottonwoods, as haughty & fertile
as they are indiscriminate, stripping off their seed-fluff
every chance they get, which doesn’t seem to bother
the scrub jays deigning to my level for a squawk
now & then before ascending to a higher branch.
Whatever folks might say about birds of a feather,
well, after a number of stints in earnest spent
staking out the local hens—who always kept
their most tender petticoats tucked under drab
slickers, yet so brusquely exposed any biting
commentary to the cold & rain—
I’ve yet to locate my flock, so the search
has turned southeastward: Taking a tip
from the meadowlark, I veer for the high desert,
my flight path crossing the sagebrush-dotted,
volcanic earth, hoping I’ll soon look down,
just beyond those convection columns braced
against the electric blue sky, & see you
floating in a sea of ten-gallon hats.
I don’t suppose your self-claimed “exile”
looks as poetic as I’ve imagined? It’s not
without a twinge of jealousy that I seek
consolation in your brand of solitude
on the other side of that horizon line; as exile,
it would seem to me, involves the condition
of having at some point belonged somewhere,
as in, other than the field I’ve been “out
standing” on my whole life, where I’m not
exactly practiced at belonging; which is why
I feel I ought to find out what I’ve been missing.
So, I’m heading out beyond the Cascades; past
the swaggering of sage grouses in the eastern uplands;
reaching for that horizon—green seeping to red,
clouds feathering out & never further from us
than one step ahead—where you can be sure
I’ll always be no more than a step away from you
& ever your honest friend, Stephanie.     

First drafted in May 2017, in the homestretch of the grueling Tupelo Press’s 30/30 Challenge I wasn’t quite sure I’d complete, “Letter from the Other Side of Halfway” was my response to Robert Okaji’s gorgeous January 2017 poem addressed to me, “Letter to Harper from Halfway to the Horizon.” Yes, it took me a while to process (and savor!) the fact that we were cultivating what seemed for all the world like the most precious, significant friendship I’d ever known, beyond anything I’d ever dared to dream of. Learning what it meant to “sculpt another morning truer than its source…” together, with the man I was beginning to realize I’d been searching for my whole life, now became my life’s imperative. He is my trajectory, my home, my beating heart, my truth, my truest love growing truer every day.