benevolence (without end)

I'm too joyful to be coherent tonight. It seems like I've spent the last six month down on my knees, praying for so many things to work out as hoped. And one by one, the answers have come, and overwhelmingly they've been yes: to tenure-track jobs, doctoral fellowships, book deals, betrothals, beginnings. This spring has been a season of extraordinary blessings for me and my loved ones. By the end of last week, there was just one more big answer to wait for, without which, it was impossible to celebrate wholeheartedly--because it seemed the most-needed blessing of all. Yes. Against the odds, despite the lottery, the quota, yes: dear S. is coming back to New York, to take up her dream job (may I say, tatlım, where it will be?) The government might call this a visa, but what it is is a homecoming, long-awaited and much-deserved.

We've been batting fragments of this poem back and forth for some time. When I got home tonight I pulled the milk crate filled with old New Yorkers out from under the desk, and sorted through them until I found it, in the issue of October 16, 2006. To whatever is out there to be thanked: thank you, thank you, oh thank you.

Autobiography: New York

Returning alone after long absence
I was engulfed. No novel, no play
had prepared me for this,
the arched November trees
glazed with ice, the night-emptied
sidewalks chipped with mica
in silent offering.
I had left it all behind
and here--it rose! The City's
fiery parcels all undone.

It was the season of regret
and the great wave of first
love lost swept over me.
Catching the buildings'
hooded eyes from afar--
my true paramours!--I was
mournful in my travelling kit,
adolescent with longing
for everything laid out
before me, down on my knees
in the frigid air, on the first
night, asking for benevolence,
second chances without end.

-Melanie Rehak