The Sympathy Card

Hallmark makes fifteen hundred versions of the thing,
each one aiming at a different kind of loss,
but all of them attempting the impossible spring
of language across the gap, the albatross
of having to say something when there’s nothing
that the language has for what has just occurred.
I stood in the aisle for twenty minutes stuffing
through the options and selected an absurd
abstraction of a sunset and the words
in deepest sympathy emblazoned there.

The sympathy card is the language of the helpless,
the honest admission that we’re almost speechless
in the face of what has happened to the ones we care for,
it’s the best that the commercial world can score for
the language of the helpless and the speechless.

But I’ve kept every card I’ve ever gotten
in a box that sits inside the closet still,
the ones that said what couldn’t be forgotten,
the handwritten notes that filled
the margins with specific memory:
I remember when he told me about the fishing trip,
I remember the way he’d laugh at me,
I remember his handshake and his grip.

The sympathy card is not enough and is enough,
it’s the gesture that says: I acknowledge what you’re in,
it’s the arrival of something through the envelope’s rough
closure, a message from outside the skin
of grief that says: the world is still aware
that you exist and that you’re hurting now,
that someone thought to stop and show they care
and paid three dollars for the paper somehow.