I Dreamed You Kissed Me

Barbara, my cousin’s wife and good friend
of the poet John Hollander’s first wife.
Of course your lips couldn’t have lightly
touched my brow as I drifted to sleep. You
left us two years before the Covid pandemic.
My cousin, broken up at your deathbed,
paints. You sculpted, and were an adjunct
in Baltimore and are my favorite relative.
Out of hospital you were in for cancer, you
stood over my mother’s casket her wake.
If anyone had an excuse not to be there,
it was you.  That’s why you’re my favorite.
I didn’t mind much you didn’t like my
poems. I hear you and him, we like Joseph
Brodsky. I remember the woods near Yale,
a house on stilts you two were staying at
because he’d gotten a grant, he mentioned
Hollander. I never got into the City to see
your shows, nor his, my favorite cousin’s.
You liked Brodsky.  He wrote chain-smoking.
In his brief expat life he won the Nobel.

The author is Peter Mladinic. 

Image by Cristina Gottardi