Gary LeBel

The Crossing

“Dear Jonnie,’ began the letter, the one I’d found crisply folded in an anthology of American verse I’d snatched for a song at a local thrift store, dust jacket and all. After arriving home I read the letter, and then again,

          and now each time I take up the book to read some chosen poet, I unfold and reread the letter first (Diane Wakoski, be patient with me tonight, my eyes will soon be yours).

And there’s a certain bittersweetness in eavesdropping on the letter’s writer who, surprisingly enough, shares my first name, and compares their love to a ‘broken pot’ in need of mending

          . . . and now it’s been twenty years exactly to the day he penned and sent it, and I wonder about the two of them: were the shards of a love re-gathered after all, made whole, ‘reborn’ as he had wished? Imagining is like the snapshot of a breath, as when the photographs of strangers fall from the pages of a careworn, thrift store novel,

          or you find in Rilke’s Book of Hours, after its pressed and delicate irises have tumbled into your lap, their bluish traces remaining on the page.

With every word
an insight grows somehow closer
to that rich and mysterious moment 
when the stranger, crossing over, 
becomes the friend

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About the Author

Gary LeBel is an artist-poet living in the greater Atlanta area whose poems have appeared in journals throughout the USA, the UK, Japan, and India. He believes that art, or anything else worth doing, is a life-long pilgrimage.

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