Feeling Close to You

I hear it again, the Burt Bacharach/Hal David song—
your first hit single—and try to unroll the irony
of feeling close to you—dead but so alive in my
memory and imagination.

                                   Did you know your family buried
you twice? First in Cypress, later in West Lake Village,
sixty miles closer to Richard, in Thousand Oaks. On
the opposite coast, I can be no more to you than a wisp
in the spirit world, a ghost.

                                           You sing to me posthumously
through a box as I write this apostrophe to express
that “Close to You” strikes me as a work of genius,
a cliché-turned-classic, one of the most played songs
in history. I wish for my lines to live in so large a house.

                                                   I’m sorry we never met
for coffee. How do you take it? My guess is cream,
no sugar. Or do you prefer tea? Do we know each other
well enough yet to skip salutations? Notice I neglect to say
Dear Karen at the top. I’d rather go right for the heart
of what matters.

                                           After all this letter-writing, I’m sorry
we can’t chat on the phone. Hey, you should see my phone—
I can play all your songs on it.

     First appeared in Letters to Karen Carpenter and Other Poems