Afternoon by Max Ritvo
Afternoon
Max RitvoWhen I was about to die
my body lit up
like when I leave my house
without my wallet.What am I missing? I ask
patting my chest
pocket.and I am missing everything living
that won’t come with me
into this sunny afternoon—my body lights up for life
like all the wishes being granted in a fountain
at the same instant—
all the coins burning the fountain dry—and I give my breath
to a small bird-shaped pipe.In the distance, behind several voices
haggling, I hear a sound like heads
clicking together. Like a game of pool,
played with people by machines.
SELECTED BY ELIZABETH METZGER
I chose Max Ritvo’s “Afternoon” from his first book Four Reincarnations. Max was my daemon and he wrote this poem word for word about a year before he died. He sent it to me in a text message from a taxi, and it is one of the most astonishing poems I have read about dying, the way being about to die becomes what it feels like to be alive.
The time since Max’s death has felt, in a sense, “posthumous” for me, too. There is a way grief makes me feel dead, or about to die, and from there I can read this poem and go right back to being, like Max’s poetry will always be, alive.
ABOUT ELIZABETH METZGER
Elizabeth Metzger is the author of The Going Is Forever (forthcoming from Milkweed in Fall 2026) and Lying In (Milkweed, 2023), as well as The Spirit Papers (University of Massachusetts, 2017), winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry. She is also the author of two chapbooks, Bed and The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death. Her poems have been published in the New Yorker, Paris Review, Poetry, The Nation, and The New York Review of Books. She is a poetry editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and teaches poetry at Columbia University, the 92nd Street Y, and Poets & Writers.
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SHARED WITH GRATITUDE
This poem appeared in Four Reincarnations by Max Ritvo, published by Milkweed Editions, 2016. (Available direct from Milkweed Editions • Also on: Amazon • Bookshop)
DESCRIPTION
“When Max Ritvo was diagnosed with cancer at age sixteen, he became the chief war correspondent for his body. The poems of Four Reincarnations are dispatches from chemotherapy beds and hospitals and the loneliest spaces in the home. They are relentlessly embodied, communicating pain, violence, and loss. And yet they are also erotically, electrically attuned to possibility and desire, to “everything living / that won’t come with me / into this sunny afternoon.” Ritvo explores the prospect of death with singular sensitivity, but he is also a poet of life and of love—a cool-eyed assessor of mortality and a fervent champion for his body and its pleasures.
Ritvo writes to his wife, ex-lovers, therapists, fathers, and one mother. He finds something to love and something to lose in everything: Listerine PocketPak breath strips, Indian mythology, wool hats. But in these poems—from the humans that animate him to the inanimate hospital machines that remind him of death—it’s Ritvo’s vulnerable, aching pitch of intimacy that establishes him as one of our finest young poets.” (Source)
ABOUT MAX RITVO
Max Ritvo (1990-2016) wrote Four Reincarnations in New York and Los Angeles over the course of a long battle with cancer. He was also the author of The Final Voicemails, edited and introduced by Louise Glück, and co-authored Letters from Max with Sarah Ruhl; both books were published posthumously. His chapbook Aeons was chosen by Jean Valentine to receive the Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship in 2014. Ritvo’s poetry has appeared in the New Yorker and Poetry, among… (more)
Read more poems by Max Ritvo • Find books by this poet on Amazon • Bookshop • Website • Or view my library
ENDNOTES
- This is Day 23 of Poems We Carry, celebrating the 20th anniversary of Read A Little Poetry—a living archive I’ve nurtured for two decades. For this milestone series, I invited writers I deeply admire to share poems that have meant something to them over time.
- Explore other works in pursuit of: mortality • death • memory • Or browse the index
- If this work resonates with you, please consider supporting the archive. Thank you for reading.
