Valerie

I joined you, dear friend,
at Valerie's bedside.
From that visit
(nine years and nine hundred miles distant)
I returned home to draft lines
for a poem that was to begin:
How well do I Know Valerie?
I know not
why I failed to finish that poem.

Valerie

Bob Komives

Perhaps it is that she recovered so beautifully,
as she had done often before,
and would repeat several times more.
I remember well
why I had to begin her poem with a question.


How can I feel so close to person with whom I have spent so little time?
How can I feel attached to her children whom I have hardly met and might not recognize on the street?
Much is due to you.
Over brief summers and a short year, you became my great and open friend.
If that were not enough,
you married a woman who embraced me and my family with old-friendship from the moment we met.
I remember that moment of meeting.
You and I and a few other young men sat in our car,  stopped in traffic, nearing the football game.
Across the street, two pedestrians passed headed to the stadium.
Everybody but I recognized the tall, beautiful girl and paid no attention to her date.
For, ignoring a recent quarrel, they knew she was your girlfriend.

Valerie looked over,
recognized,
and, with coy smile,
excused herself to her date as she walked to our motionless car.
Never have I seen more adept display of warm and cool, receptivity and reserve, vulnerability and strength, friendliness and dignity.
I was charmed.
It was clear to me that this lover's quarrel must end (or, I suppose, continue lovingly indefinitely) for your sake and mine.
Perhaps we can best testify who, in the decades since that Saturday, saw Valerie so little.
So quickly a long-interrupted conversation would return to the important, difficult, and humorous aspects of life, as if there had been no gap of years.
She walked gently on a plain that seemed above the rest of us, yet she would elevate us above herself.


How well did I know Valerie?
I feel that a few times I knew her well,
but never, dear friend,
did I know her well enough.

Bob Komives :: Fort Collins ::  (c) 2004 :: Valerie :: 0404