For You, Sherry Darling

Woke up this morning with my mind set on
the radio. It felt like freedom to me, the radio
telling stories like it used to. Springsteen’s
mother-in-law yapping in the back seat followed
by him yapping at his girl to hang on, suicide
isn’t worth it, please stay here, it’s not your lungs
this time…

I turn off the radio. Everyone there
is fictional, mythic; sometimes true, sometimes
not. I’ve got a real life here, after all;
there’s no point in sucking up to a hero’s life
no matter how fraught it is with thrills or danger
or even the silly eyes-closed headache of a woman
doing her best to get along with a son-in-law
who just doesn’t get it…

If I close my eyes, I almost do get it. I almost
understand all of them — a woman frustrated
with a headachy man who has had his purity fussed with
by a woman who has punctured his planet
either by silence toward her mother’s trivia
or by silence toward her own, that silence being
not trivial at all as she slides toward death —

or perhaps it is? Perhaps this one’s not Sherry
baby at all but someone else, someone nameless
to the man who serenely doesn’t care about him
and I am impotent to speak of her, so powerless
in the face of her own death that she still haunts me
years, decades later; all I have now is a song sung
by someone else. I turn the radio back on;

her ears are tuned to the sound of an alien distant shore,
or something like it. I would close these eyes if I could,
Sherry or Julie or whatever your name was.
Believe me,
I would.