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The Stag
for Israel Halpern
by Becky Dennison Sakellariou

Your wife has migraines. I want to tell you
of a new remedy I read about, but I do not
know you yet.

Your voice has no beard. Trim, dark, clean-
shaven, your name a whole country, mine
another language.

We tell each other things. Habits, small confessions,
pride-and-joys. You tell me of the stag you saw
standing against

the moon, how, heartbroken, you couldn't write
of it. I tell you my desire to stay outside the world, to dip
into it only briefly.

I hear your wife in the background, your neighbor
come to ask your help in plowing the driveway.
I imagine you

living at the edge of a meadow that tips down
into a pine grove where you often go when you
are tired of poetics.

Later, I see your photo, a large man with a huge white
beard, and yet you still greet my voice softly
and are pleased

with my news. You tell me of your walks
behind your house, the field where you sat
on the rock

and watched the stag, forgetting that the world
persists with and without us, our words barely
tracing the outlines.

I am sad that we will not meet. You say we will.
I do not quite believe this, coming from a place
where things

rarely happen the way they are said to. I do not know
how to say that I would like to watch you,
big and generous,

standing at the mike, speaking your stories, dreams,
lifting our hearts, holding us all in your large
white hands.