She goes right to the page
where he’s written
Hi Lydia,
the letters
tight as fists on a steering wheel.
In the picture, he’s my age.
He walked through my school. Its white tile,
its doorknobs. Ted
who liked
to swing into the skull.
Forward again with both
arms round.
But before that. Before he
opened the telescope
of his hands.
The message says Nice knowing you.
In a cartoon my sister loves
to watch, Ben Franklin
courts storms
with his kite,
and when he is struck
his body keeps changing
from jagged bolt to flesh
and back again.
The buzz is funny. The shaking legs.
Baptized Ted, faith thin
as a wire. Valiant Ted.
Ted of the fraudulent sling
on his arm, struggling with books
when a brunette walks by—
her kindness
a mouth of its own.
Ted with the guileless
smile. Ted who didn’t flinch.
He kept some of them alive,
for a while. In the woods
whose trees I know.
Their skin unpeeling
into darkness and clodded ground.