She looks at me and says, “Everyone, I think, is doing the best they can.”
By that she means herself, and me, and everyone suffering and hurting
and grasping and struggling and trying hard and usually failing.
It was a problem when the rays came, the pain, the electric shocks.
“How can you really handle such terrible inconveniences?” I ask.
She thinks the best thing to do sometimes is to nail the windows shut.
A thick layer of aluminum foil helps protect her against the worst of it.
It seems unlikely to me, but who am I to judge? Her pain and mine are not the same.
She a missing person, and I am missing, too.
The missing people walk the streets, ride the subway, sit alone in the dark.
The missing people look away, slip into the alley, avoid the crowds.
The missing people were not invisible until we looked away.
Am I doing the best I can?
There is such a sense of sad beauty throughout this poem – of isolation and vulnerability. And that final line? Following on from the ‘The missing people were not invisible until we looked away’? It’s quite, quite remarkable. The echo of that broken voice lasts long after the poem has been read.