So Long

Anticipating and then grieving the death of her father, Jen Levitt's So Long fleshes out a full elegiac register, sitting with the mourning of farewell while holding onto gratitude, remembrance, and a permeating love. 'Soon,' she says, 'we'll have to find another way to meet, as moonlight / makes the river glow.' In the contrails of bittersweet loss, Levitt's speaker observes all that surrounds her, and the self, too, as a phenomenon in loneliness. In the suburbs, she notes high- school athletes circling 'in their sweat-resistant fabrics,' 'so natural in their tank tops, those dutiful kids trying to beat time'; upstate, she finds herself in temple where Broadway music has replaced prayer and discovers 'no promises, / but, like hearing a rustle in deep woods & turning to locate its source, the chance for something rare.' It is this humanistic faith that inverts the title's idiomatic goodbye into a statement of permanence, the truth of our enduring, improbable lives: look at this, she seems to command herself, '& look at how lucky I've been, for so long.'