un poème pour mon amie, Gloria Caballero, qui est partie

 

 

Gloria est allée en 2009 a Québec, après le morte de mon mari, Tony.  Ici dans la foto elle est à Québec.  Elle a été mon amie 60 ans. 

Photogenicity?  Photogeneity?
                        (for Gloria Caballero)

 

With a thousand words I’d still not say
how beautiful you were on the ferry that day
we made our way back from Staten Island
(and why had we gone?  Can you recall?)

Past the lady de libertád in upper corner there
in that photograph you keep near your chair:
you in your long red coat with your short hair
as black at 67 as back in 1957 when we sat

In 6^th grade country school desks next
to each other.  What if we’d guessed
that one day sixty years later, before dark,
we’d be ferrying back to Battery Park?

We’d have wiggled with giggles, been sent
to stand in the hall.  Out of hearing, then,
you’d be free to teach me new words.
Luciérnaga, maybe, or Photogénica
(meaning, sometimes, to make or emit light,
as well as how we use it for such as you
who know to let the lens have you,
the life in you, the light you harbor,
the torch you carry, your liberty to love
what photographer with camera can do –
and thus all of us who will ever see you.)

These ten years since that day,
have they been a dark hallway?
Is it easier to bear if you sit in that chair
in the good light to see, as you lean over the rail,
nearing Manhattan, how long your striking beauty
has found Liberty, its photogenic proof?                                   

 Nov. 3, 2019

 

 

(Somewhere I have the photo this poem refers to, but for now I post the photo of Gloria in Québec on the grounds of the Museum of Fine Arts)