CHRISTMAS CARD FOR A FRIEND

　

Sent a Christmas card to an old friend

whom I hadn’t seen in years.

Ours was that magical relationship called

boyhood buddies, the ones who share private jokes

and laugh at the world like a pair of haughty outsiders;

the ones who confessed

their most secret experiences to one another

like patient to doctor, sinner to priest.

Together we scaled adolescence

and beat off adulthood, reciting our personal mysteries

in V-8 cars, beers gulped to unknown hours of unseen days

as we listened to rock “n” roll on the AM radio,

fending off a world ready to snap us up

like cheap garments at a flea market.

Eventually we did what boys turning to men do:

marriage, fatherhood, army, jobs.

And before we knew it, all the secrets had been told,

the mysteries solved and forgotten,

and virginal boys became stubbly faced men

with fewer private jokes to share.

He was forced to move out of state,

bumping along the ties of a railroad job.

Even before he left there were lean stretches of silence

when the phone didn’t ring, beers were unopened

and sinewy conversations went unspoken.

He never told me he was leaving.

A mutual friend broke the news,

and for several years only Christmas cards

kept us tethered to our eroding base of friendship.

Then one year my Christmas card was returned

with a rude yellow label on the envelope that read:






Moved. Forwarding order expired.

Nor did I receive a card from him.

After thirty years we were cut loose and floating apart,

like satellites escaping the pull of gravity.

I have lost his grip and his whereabouts

as he freefalls through space,

and the envelope with the yellow label

sits unopened on the table,

one last private joke sealed inside.