To Rosie

you never blamed me
recognising my weakness as normal, human
with your bridge gone now
I guess I won't see those people anymore.
So much loss, so many of us
slipping further apart.
The air on south grand is a faint perfume
in my memory. I lived there, an irony
in 1981 ... those perfumed cigarettes
mixed with Ricardo's cannabis.
You would never fold your cards,
even when it made sense.

The Universe is too damn random.
My fourteen year old son told me that.


This poem was written after Rosie Richmond died at the end of February, 1994. Rosie lived for many years in the building at 117 South Grand where Pat and I lived in 1980-81. She moved in long after I had moved out and ended up living with Bradway. Rosie and Ric Amezquita used to come over and play poker with us at the long dining room table that Pat had acquired. These games usually featured Ross Hulvey and sometimes I think JW, and various other diverse denizens of that scene. They alway featured vast quantities of marijuana. Ric liked to believe he could handle it better than anyone else and so felt it was an advantage to him. He lost consistently. One time my son, Joel, won seven hands in a row and got Ricardo riled up. Perhaps because Joel was like 10-11 at the time. Joel's quote about the randomness of the universe is from the trip to New York city he made in 1985, to see me and Becky when Becky was in the grad school at Columbia. He turned fifteen in August that summer, right after he was with us in Manhattan.

Rosie smoked these awful clove cigarettes (I think they are from India) and they smelled plenty. And they were strong. She had quite a sense of personal style that girl. I miss her plenty, as do many other people. As predicted in the poem I had little to do with the feminist cabal after that. BB had left the Coalition. I would occasionally see Polly Poskin. I noticed on tv recently that Polly is the president of my old neighborhood association in Springfield, Harvard Park. I was the secretary for the group for many years, mostly because I had a computer and a laser printer.

In 1987 when J. decided to make people decide whether they were my friend or not over what happened in 1979, Rosie absolutely remained my friend and often came over to Becky and mine's house on Bryn Mawr. And while she lived and ran Brainchild we would occasionally have shared readings. I published several of her stories in the Writer's Bar-B-Q. She was quite the funny writer. I still have a manuscript of Duffy Jo, her comic western novel, and also Fifth Position, her roman a clef of life in Springfield in the 1980s. A wise and funny piece. Rosie and I didn't always see eye to eye, but I loved her anyway. When you love someone that way you forgive their weaknesses and their mistakes. That is how you can tell who your real friends are.