Linda Hillman Chayes
Linda Hillman Chayes is the author of two chapbooks, Not My First Walk on the Moon and The Lapse, both published by Finishing Line Press. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Kestrel, American Poetry Journal, Bracken, Quartet, Westchester Review, 2 Horatio, Wild Roof and other publications. She practices as a psychologist / psychoanalyst in New York City. Among her publications as a psychoanalyst, she co-wrote and co-edited a book The Voice of the Analyst: Narratives in Developing a Psychoanalytic Identity published by Routledge Press in 2018.
Yahrzeit
One year gone and we haven’t had the footstone
carved. Your absence is as fickle as this winter
weather. One day you are blanketing the pine
limbs in heavy white shrouds, the next passing
in and out of sight like cirrus clouds. All we have
is a number to locate the grave, and I have a hard
time finding you. It’s nobody’s fault. You preferred
elusive or was that just alone. You were my weather,
the humidity of your voice a forecast of how many
layers I needed for the day, and I admit I have been
naked without you. I have mistaken so many others
for you, the cousin who waited for me when I got lost,
the teacher who picked me out of a large lecture
hall, every woman and man who let me help
them or was it hug them. And then, there’s the
beloved daughter, sister, mother, grandmother
in the grave next to yours. I love her too.
