Letter to a Lost Friend

There must be a Russian word to describe what has happened

between us, like ostyt, which can be used

for a cup of  tea that is too hot, but after you walk to the next room,

and return, it is too cool; or perekhotet,

which is to want something so much over months

and even years that when you get it, you have lost

the desire. Pushkin said, when he saw his portrait by Kiprensky,

“It is like looking into a mirror, but one that flatters me.”

What is the word for someone who looks into her friend’s face

and sees once smooth skin gone like a train that has left

the station in Petersburg with its wide avenues and nights

at the Stray Dog Cafe, sex with the wrong men,

who looked so right by candlelight, when everyone was young

and smoked hand-rolled cigarettes, painted or wrote

all night but nothing good, drank too much vodka, and woke

in the painful daylight with skin like fresh cream, books

everywhere, Lorca on Gogol, Tolstoy under Madame de Sévigné,

so that now, on a train in the taiga of  Siberia,

I see what she sees — all my books alphabetized and on shelves,

feet misshapen, hands ribbed with raised veins,

neck crumpled like last week’s newspaper, while her friends

are young, their skin pimply and eyes bright as puppies’,

and who can blame her, for how lucky we are to be loved

for even a moment, though I can’t help but feel like Pushkin,

a rough ball of  lead lodged in his gut, looking at his books

and saying, “Goodbye, my dear friends,” as those volumes

close and turn back into oblong blocks, dust clouding

the gold leaf that once shimmered on their spines.

Barbara Hamby