I am analogously of Amy and I am, like Amy, sorry.
"It hadn’t occurred to me, really--it was an oversight, a cognitive omission of sorts. Or simple inattentiveness, perhaps, a near-gaffe of preoccupation that seems, now, a little clumsy. Maybe a bit clumsier than that. Maybe I was rather clumsy, quite clumsy. Probably it was clumsy, was oafish, to submit a poem to you when I am not an Amy.
I am not an Amy; I know that. I did not think about that, about the nomenclatural nature of destiny and how an annal can close at Christening. I ignored your names, and I ignored my own, and that is more than clumsy--it is treacherous, duplicitous, an apostate perfidy. Worse, I ignored that I am not a woman, or female, or anything other than a vast, baritone column of manly WASP cis-het pinstripe privilege a-swagger through Northern California in size-fifteen wingtips, dirty-blonde son riding my shoulders like a prince astride a purebred horse.
I am thoughtless, blundering, oblivious; I am precipitate and only retroactively conscientious. I am not unapologetic or utterly unaware, though; while I am not Amy or normatively like Amy, I am analogously of Amy and I am, like Amy, sorry.
I am so very, very sorry, Amy; I am so sorry."
A Little Bit of Help
If I'd known it would be that way
I would have ground them for you;
how could I guess the dress-shoe pestle,
the slow crunch of pills crushed one by one
in the closet of housebound clothes,
guess you harrowed, gasping, groping
through cluttered twilight for the shoe,
the prescription bottle? When
I left the doctor's office in Ohio,
a fistful of samples dry in my mouth
and that swindled scrip dead in my palm
all seemed final. You died that October
but for me you died in March, stiffened
and cyanodized before I filled
your scrip, fulfilled your final wish,
before I sent your pills by parcel post.
For me, you died while I leaned on my car
in a parking lot, drug samples, cigarettes,
passers-by and absent geese and traffic
all helping me forget what we'd done.
If I'd known it would be that way
I would have ground them for you
but I made you work for that bitter dust,
made you earn your dead-shudder sleep.