When Grace at the Bliss Café Calls by Jane Vandenburgh

When Grace at the Bliss Café Calls

It’s a terrible day in Baltimore,

and in Kathmandu, and in the port

city of Salerno gloom pervades, and

your own private sorrow’s throbbing

in the exact center of your right

hand, a pain that radiates outward

from palm to fingers that cannot find

the shape of your mechanical pencil,

a Mont Blanc in the burgundy they

don’t make anymore, a gift given

long ago, engraved, and obviously

too good for you since now you’ve lost

it, and this lack fixes you in a place

of grief age-old and physical, an

ache so similar to the pulsing you’d

feel in the exact center of either palm

after your father killed himself and

you felt the immediate need to write

lists, words invented for some self-

administered spelling test, your then

being told this was an odd, wrong,

cold thing to do. America, you’d

write, if you had your pencil, will you

now turn out to be only a beautiful

idea? You dreaming the weight of

a loss that feels as incalculable as

being orphaned at nine or seeing

another neighborhood gutted or

our communal need to witness the

next 300 lost at sea. Your name

almost exactly his, the etching now

faint along its barrel, and how you’ve

given pens and pencils to your own

kids extravagantly, each birthday, every

Christmas, then found them still in

boxes stuffed in a sock drawer after

they’d returned to school. It was the

classroom that saved you, the clean

notebook, the word September, and

all that white around the black block

of text where you could write what

you really thought, which was that

the dead could talk to you, like when

you stayed in bed all day drawing

lilacs because Ross’s wife was Orthodox

so there was was no time to get to his

funeral. Stones thrown, cop cars

torched, bells ringing out across our

riven land, and it’s exactly here, typing

the word riven, then wondering if

you know what it really means, that the

phone rings, the read-out saying Bliss

and it’s Grace, your server at the

vegetarian café by the creek 200 miles

away where you ate three days ago,

saying she needs your address so she

can mail your pencil back to you.