Life-Long

April 30 2017

I envy the childhood friend

who becomes life-long.

The rambling letters

sent-off to the opposite coast.

The bulging envelopes

with their row of cancelled stamps

that materialize

sporadically,

dropping through the mail slot

with a reassuring thud.

Not at all the same

as bumping into an old high school acquaintance

in a distant time zone

in some God-forsaken place;

both exclaiming what a small world

as you desperately search

for each other's name.

And not like every few days

getting together with your childhood friend

at some chi-chi cafe;

when you might easily lose touch,

because scarcity fuels desire

while familiarity breeds contempt.

And those long confessional letters

you'd never have sent

and could never have said

face-to-face.

I guess friendship as an idea

– the idealized friend

on whom you can project

whatever virtue you want –

is more powerful than flesh and blood.

Yellowing letters, gathering dust

bundled-up in string.

One day, they will clean out the attic

and sit down to read,

cross-legged

in the filtered light, and musty air.

When time will have made the secrets

seem hum-drum.

And the final salutation

of all my love

will be understood for what it was;

as true as any other,

as essential, and right.

I'm gratified to finally write something about friendship. There is so much poetry about the anguish and ecstasy of romantic love; not enough about the steady and enduring relationships that can truly sustain us.

I have no childhood friends who have become life-long. But I find this a remarkable accomplishment, and something to envy: someone who knows you almost as well as you know yourself; with whom so much history is shared; and with whom you can be fully open, but without the high stakes of marriage, family, sex.

I was led to write this poem after reading the following paragraph in the recent Atlantic (May 2017, by Meghan O'Rourke); the opening lines in an article about new biographies of these two writers:

Elizabeth bishop, then 35, and Robert Lowell, almost 30, met in 1947 at a dinner in New York City hosted by Randall Jarrell. They struck up an unusual lifelong friendship fuelled by mutual admiration, genuine devotion, and the fact that they rarely saw each other—which meant that in their correspondence they could divulge their best and worst selves, without the friction of actual contact.

I would very much have liked to use “ ...the friction of actual contact”, but probably could never have written it as well as O'Rourke!

As a reclusive loner, I've always been more comfortable in similar epistolary relationships. Today, of course, this means email. Which leads me to wonder what will be left for the future literary biographers (thinking in general, of course, since this hardly applies to me!) Because even if emails are archived in hard drive or cloud, electronic storage is a lot less reliable than paper. How odd, this inverse relationship between technology and posterity: clay tablets survive for thousands of years, paper for hundreds. Digital media: who knows?