From Martha, To Tom Frost

(Note: This letter is from the perspective of "Martha", the character in this Tom Waits song. I suggest listening to the song first before reading the letter. If you're not familiar with this or other Tom Waits songs, I recommend clearing your calendar for the day and getting to know him. That's why I'm posting this on a Sunday.)

Tom, you were smart not to call collect. I still recognize your voice, even though the cigarettes and booze have grated it into a rough finish. You have a tone that when you believe in what you’re saying rings like a Buddhist meditation bell. You could never fake it. I would have never accepted the charges.

 

But you knew that.

Yes, poetry. You read Neruda and cummings and then there was the night you would not stop reading Ginsberg even though I begged. You insisted this was the way to experience Ginsberg, one long epic reading and since that night whenever I hear the word “kaddish” I taste plums. It’s surprisingly unpleasant.

I like my poems in my hand. I like my fingers on the words. I see more than I can hear.

And yes, the prose. I was reading Simone de Beauvoir and you were reading Stephen King. Did you think I would forget? Did you hope? I read Joan Didion and you read Larry McMurtry. I read Anais Nin and you read stock profiles on the back page of the business section. It wasn’t even out of the Wall Street Journal, Tom.

Your piano isn’t beautiful exactly. But it is a kind of beautiful. Your songs must have come after we split and I would like to think that when I left, a kind of urgency grew. Clearly, it was over. Matilda and all. I couldn’t live with it. We never waltzed. We didn’t live in music. You needed music to find you. You needed Matilda.

I remember the day I knew it was over. You were pouring coffee and talking about building a shelf or putting up a shelf. Something with wood and nails. We spent the day lounging in bed, on the couch as the light shifted through the curtains. It would be three more months before we would admit it wouldn’t work, but we both knew then. You never built the shelf. I wrote poems about it.

I remember quiet evenings.

Your memories of us break in all the wrong places, Tom. At all the wrong angles.