the poems do all the good

“When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate — the genetic and neural fate — of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.” ― Oliver Sacks”

“Did the poems do any good? We’ll never know. We certainly wrote, all of us, some very bad poems, and we knew it. But the alternative was not to do it at all, and that seemed unthinkable, and it still does.” — W.S. Merwin

“Watch me a bit longer, you said, and tell me all.” — Vedran Jankovic

The world darts like a hare and we chase it like hounds.

I cling to stillness that resides some where under the frenzy.

When you really give something your attention, everything else seems to fall into a hush, like watching the snow fall on a winter evening, covering every blemish on the ground. Just for a little while.

I learned of a friend’s passing in December.

I hadn’t heard from Vedran in years. We had studied abroad in Rome together and often met up in coffee shops in Seattle to discuss poetry and philosophy and books, writing, and food.

He treated me like a little sister - always with a protective and playful demeanor. The first sip of wine I ever had was out of his glass, in Paestum, after a sunny spring day of frolicking in grassy ruins of old temples and sampling peach cobbler and “boofalo” mozzerella, as he called it in his thick Serbian/Bosnian accent.

We were both the eldest children of immigrant families driven away from our ancestral homes due to war and genocide. We didn’t speak much about it, but there was always an unspoken kinship in the burden that we shared.

Maybe that’s why we both were so drawn to language, English in particular, as it was mastery of a culture that was not ours. A way to bridge both worlds. A way to be taken seriously. A way to hold on to ourselves. A way to belong.

A few years ago, I had noticed that he was thinner and more palid than normal. The lavender under his eyes, a glimpse into the sleeplessness that haunted him. “Daylight Dracula,” I would jokingly call him as he sipped his espresso and crinkled his eyes in a small smile.

He had gone through a bad break up and it was consuming him in ways he never spoke to me about. After a while, I stopped hearing from him.

I wrote him a letter addressed to his last known residence. After months and months of waiting, I received a response, from his mother. The card simply said that she wished to speak to me. Her phone number was scrawled on the inside.

Part of me knew then what she was going to tell me.

It was Christmas Eve and dreading the conversation awaiting me, I postponed calling the number on the card until December 26. When she heard my voice, she broke down into tears as she told me her son was “lost”.

After years of suspecting the worst, I finally had an answer.

I went to visit her and her husband and their bunny, Masha - who was named after a character in one of Vedran’s favorite bedtime stories. They welcomed me warmly but with a heavy grief.

We laid fresh flowers on his grave and wept as the wind lapped at our faces.

Before I left the house she let me look through his books and gave me one of his watches from his large collection because of an old poem he had once written about an old broken watch. I keep it on my book shelf in my office where I do my writing.

I saw you, like you saw me, like a reflection in the sea. A decade later I can still see the ruins. I can hear your voice, whispered like the wind swaying in the tall grass.

I’ll keep time for you, my brother, until the clock stands still for me.