This poem begins with licking a postage stamp
which implies I wrote the letter before 1989,
my moist tongue tasting the last postal glue,

The friend I was writing to thirty-three years ago
died ten years ago.

The letter expressed the pleasure we took
in the range and depth of our friendship,
the meals we ate,
the wine we drank,
the stories told from before we met,
late walks through shadowed streets,
long conversations on art and politics,
discussion’s of Eric Rohmer’s film Claire’s Knee,
Bernstein’s Harvard lectures The Unanswered Question,
the whole ouevre of our friendship,
I may even have written I love you,
although that’s not what men notoriously do.

I may not have.
I don’t remember.
I hope I did.