like a piece of driftwood
in the surf of an angry sea
she was intelligent and beau-
tiful and well-off she made
friends easily yet she wasn’t
able to put the pieces to-
gether into any recognizable
shape she wasn’t sure who
she wanted to be so she
ended up being no one in par-
ticular she made herself al-
most invisible she was the
person you loved so much who
really wasn’t there at all.
James Laughlin, from Poems New and Selected, 1996.
Foto: Rita Magalhães
