Elegy by Michele Glazer

Strawberries in season still make sweet jam & your son's had sex.
You've been dead eleven years.

As I write it I take it back.





*

i find it incredibly moving, in a way i can't explain, which is probably part of its power. i know there's something odd, unnatural, difficult to parse about the phrase "son's had sex," and that this requires me to slow down at that point in confusion, a slowing which may as well be the surprise of the addressed; and i know there are enough s's to make the entire first half of this poem a whisper; and i know she makes me by virtue of the act of reading into a kind of ghost; and i know the falling away of sensuousness is almost nauseatingly precipitous; and i know the last line is almost palindromic and all-encompassing and futile and yet still somehow defiant and paradoxical, especially because while admitting defeat it's still suddenly asserting this 'i' into a world - the world of the elegy - that seems like it should exclude self-awareness, as if the only self-awareness in the face of death is a kind of boorish selfishness. i don't know how this was made. or if it's just me. or how glazer knew, when she went to edit this poem, that it was done. even the little things. why the ampersand? why "eleven" spelled out? i can see that both of those are necessary and that the poem would fall apart without them, but i can't see how the choice to include them was made.