What begins as a simple nostalgic conversation turns into a much deeper emotional reconnection in RG Evans’s poem of male friendship.
—
The Conversation
After a few years, he calls me, my old friend
whom I’d assumed was dead, and asks me
What was the name of the girl who sat up front
in Singer’s class, the one with the hair?
Carolyn Swift, I say without a beat of hesitation.
And over the phone line we fall into place
like disused but ready tumblers in a lock.
We speak of grandchildren and divorces,
of surgeries and sobriety, both our pasts
catching up quickly as stretched rubber bands
finally let fly. I don’t tell him about the time
I tried to kill myself. He doesn’t tell me
he’s dying, though I’d heard that from another
not so long ago. For a moment, I long to see him,
to put a face as he looks now with this old familiar voice.
Then I remember some other old friends
whose pictures I’ve seen lately and am content
to settle for his voice, the voice of my classmate
from Holy Cross, a little slower and warmer
than it was back then, but the same voice,
the voice I loved and love still. I stop him
when he starts to say goodbye. Carolyn Swift,
I say again. What about her? His voice
sounds like a lifetime when he says,
She was something else, wasn’t she?
Wasn’t she something else?
***
Editor’s Note: RG Evans has published with us before. Read “Smoke” and “After They Finish With You.”
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