Roz declines

  Roz declines the nomination.                                continued from here

“Roz?” Nils says.
     “What?” I answer.
     “I could speak to her, maybe?”
     “I don’t know. Wait.” And “Roz!” I call out before I put the phone down – so Nils can
hear me. Roz is working the yard; she cannot. Then I wonder what I should count up to to have found her and talked to her and come back to the phone And I decide 100, if I can’t slowly. I sit down at the kitchen table. In the middle is the wooden salt and pepper Roz bought on a trip she and her friend Maggie took to Abingdon. (Where they saw a sign!)

 “Nils,” I say into the phone.
     “Yes.”
     “No.”
     “No what?”
     “Roz doesn’t want to talk to you.”
     “Oh.”
     “Yeah.” I try to sound sympathetic. I do sound sympathetic … like sugar and cinnamon. (I’m still sitting at the kitchen table.) Or a ballad sung by what-they-used to call
“a girl singer,” a really good one, like Norah Jones.
      “Did she say …” He doesn’t get to “why”; he interrupts himself: “Never mind.”
     “She said,” I talk over him, I jump in between ne- and -ver. I say, “she’d already voted” over “mind.”

“Okay,” Nils says. “I don’t suppose … Albert?”
     “He’s asleep, I think.”
     “Yeah.” [Pause.] “Okay.” Nils sounds – for once! – as if he doesn’t know what to say next.

 So, it’s been a good conversation.
                                                                  10.27.21 

My friend Dietrich is trying to write epigrams. Again – he tried once before. You can judge his success. Let me know if you think I should discourage his continuing:

Forgivable Sin

She didn’t get the joke,
their hacking laughter.
“the suicide in love with death,
and life thereafter.”

 Supplication

She shudders—she knows,
despite his airs,
how he paws her over
in his prayers.