Backgammon and Steely Dan

November 15, 1998

By Chris Smith

We played backgammon the night of the day she died.

We sat on the bed where her child body breathed its last,

    Where I felt with the palm of my hand

    The final beat of her heart.

We played backgammon the night of the day she died.

We moved the pieces—white and brown—from point to point.

We rolled the dice and moved again.

We played backgammon the night of the day she died.

We listened to the sounds from the other room.

Steely Dan—he played it for his friend.

    Over and over and over.

He drank Foster’s. He washed the dishes.

He listened.

We played backgammon the night of the day she died.

The phone rang. My friend called.

You still carry on, she said.

We cried.

We played backgammon the night of the day she died.

Twelve years later, Steely Dan music—even in the background—pierces me.

I turn away—shrunken in pain.

I still play backgammon.

*****

On November 2, 1986, my sweet child Alexa died from brain cancer. She was seven years old. Childhood cancer is a scourge on the lives of children and their families. Alexa's sister, Tarah, who is now 22, never met Lexie. However, Tarah is honoring Lexie's memory by participating in St. Baldrick's tomorrow in Pepperell, Massachusetts. St. Baldrick's funds go toward researching childhood cancer. Please consider supporting the effort so that there will be no more poems about backgammon and Steely Dan and how such tragedies affect all of us our entire lives. I still cannot listen to Steely Dan...

Thank you.

http://www.stbaldricks.org/participants/mypage/participantid/418206

(I wrote the above poem in 1998, when I was Chris Smith, thus the different byline.)