Ed Granger

Dear Nameless

Dear keyhole I squint through to see that other life—Matthew Thorburn, “Dear Almost”

It’s been a while since I spoke to you, so 
long ago the traces in this room we almost 
brought you to are gone. This moon’s 
the same reluctant shadow-maker 
and the folk-art dresser drawers are stuffed 
with hand-me-downs that might have held 
a whiff of you still. They don’t, of course—I have 
to shut my eyes and count to ten to find you 
in the ultrasound technician’s voice, that tone 
airline pilots use to let you know this minor 
turbulence won’t last past thirty thousand feet.
No magic in her plastic wand. No picture worth 
your million missing words. Just the bright-lit 
screen of you. The jellied pumpkin 
belly of you. The exam table paper of you, its 
snare-drum-played-with-brushes rustle 
as your mom slid back into her mundane 
shoes. Later, in a room that could have been 
its sterile twin, I looked down from orbit above 
a doctor’s pale-blue scrubs onto the great red lake 
of you, as his astronaut’s cadence coolly 
explained the next procedure. Roger, Houston. 
Then the far side swallowed you. The lights 
switched off, the room grew cold, every machine 
was unplugged, the onion-skin paper lay smooth. 
The onesies and stacks of pastel tees that silt 
the mouths of these tulip’d drawers were all your 
nearly-sister’s. Maybe you knew she’d be a golden 
child, younger yet compelled to always wait up. 
Maybe you knew my father wrote The Big Book 
of How-Not-To, and your stillness was a gesture 
at how much I had to learn. And still do. As if you heard 
my voice from some far distant altitude and sensed 
I’m the man in the moon, rowing my skiff 
across a solitary sea, and the skiff is 
love, and it only had room enough for one of you.