And So Long, I’ve Had You Fame
How odd that she would die into an August
night, I would have thought
she would have gone out in a pale clear
night of autumn, covered to the shoulder
in an ivory sheet, hair
fanned out across the pillow perfectly.
Fame will go by, and, so long, I’ve had you, Fame.
From under the door, the lights leak
into the hall & Sinatra going
over & over in the bedroom on repeat.
I was six & you were dying out.
I was sitting in a sky blue metal chair
in our kitchen in the east
digesting the fact, still, of my mother’s second
honeymoon & the man living all over
our house, that she loved him, had him hard.
The sun was on our kitchen table, lighting
the back of my hand & the headline
in the Post Gazette said you were done.
That you were dying
even in the hour when our neighborhood
went indigo last night, in the hour
when our palms were stained by Sno-Cones,
in the hour when Russell’s father would take home
the bases from the baseball diamond,
then my sister & I would move like spiders
into the nests of our dotted swiss nightgowns,
in the hours of a windless August night
in Pittsburgh & somewhere
Sinatra redundant
no one lifts the needle up, he’s singing
like an angel
all night long along the famous dusk
of the Pacific shoreline
as your breathing slowed into the sweetest
toxic nothingness, so long, I’ve had you, face
down, Cursum Perficio.
Copyright Credit: "And So Long, I've Had You Fame" from A Hunger by Lucie Brock-Broido, copyright © 1988 by Lucie Brock-Broido. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Source: A Hunger (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1988)