ANNE

i remember Anne’s little apartment by the UN,

and a cat named Mao

i would get dropped there for an afternoon

we’d eat rice in bowls on the futon

surrounded by stacks of colored books, 

she would tell me about growing up with my dad and his brothers, 

how magic she thought they were when she met them,

i remember worrying that she was lonely, and wondering, 

maybe asking, where everyone was, her family? 

feeling her special love for me, but also fearing her life, could it be mine? 

like my best friend’s daughter when she comes to my apartment

for the afternoon, freckle face scrunched, is this where you live? 

with nobody else? do you have kiddos? why not?

you’ve never made anything? 

she holds her belly with one hand,  princess doll with the other

across my life Anne has given me gifts, buys me meals, 

like 6 years ago when we had fancy lunch in Rhinebeck, 

soup in a shallow bowls with crisped garnish,

my tears falling into the warm napkin as she inquired into

a softer, scarier realm, despite my efforts to deliver

my angry heart's play-by-play,

she ordered me tea and said something basic but astute

about beingawomanbeingthirty, what the symbols begin 

to mean, the claustrophobic architecture they erect, 

which landed like a cool hand to my fluttering pulse,

the place where head and neck meet, so hot with

dread of regret, her words and look the quietest

soothing secret, even if their story is a blasted one,

and i wondered then, had she actually been lonely, 

then or before, and was I, even? there with the soup? 

or here now, in my childless realm of treasures and time? 

when i was small I thought Anne was magic,

and as we grew her magic did too, both of our lives exhaling outside

the lines of any plan, and from her change she spoke to me across

the table's threshold, told me about when my grandma took her out to lunch 

in Manhattan, white tablecloths and wine, two women a generation apart 

named Anne, motherless in different ways, only-children raised in the city, 

how my grandma told 30 year old Anne about the sorrow of growing old,

though only in her 60s and with a new lover and 4 grown sons,

how mother grandmother Anne looked at childless Anne and said:

well i guess now i just wait to die! 

and they both stared frozen, then laughed, 

couldn't stop, two women,  

two wild kind chestnut haired girls

grown and growing,

looking at each other across

the dissolving, unblocked

space of it all