Her name is unimportant here,
not because she was
but because I do not want you
to know her in the way
I will describe her.
She hung around us,
not with us.
We had a nickname for her.
I will not say it.
Did not mock her, not
directly, not to her
face, unless our rolled eyes count
as mockery, or our excuses
to leave and go to class,
even if there was no class;
I will say it.
I understand now
and will admit it now:
there was no class.
In casual discussion
she mentioned once that
if they ever filmed
the story of her life
she wanted to be played by
Olivia Newton-John.
We rolled our eyes.
We went straight off to no class.
She died young of cancer.
Her name was Unimportant.
Her nickname was cruel
and unnecessary and
mocked her body.
God, we were awful
behind her back
and I suspect
to her face too
if I think hard about who
I was, who I may still be.
In the movie of my life
I should be played by
a stone sunk into the silt
at the bottom of a cold lake,
a stone so deep in the water
the chance of it ever being seen
by human eyes is next to nothing.
Infinitesimal. A probability so small
you could hear the dead laughing at it.
Dark Matter 