2

ELEGY WITH NARRATIVE OF TRAGIC PASSING,
NOSTALGIA, AND PERFUNCTORY INVOCATION OF PEACE

There was the slip, the fall, the misstep and then
behind them all the cast-off banana peel
or slick of ice impossible at night to even see
or warm puddle of water issuing from
the refrigerator larded with how many years
of midnight oaths of final repair,
and the ankle turned years ago, lifetimes ago,
agos ago, it seems, so long it's been
cursing you, your stupidity, your drunkenness,
your inability to lift from the earth
one inch without truly dire consequence.
And then the bad knee, no, both,
plural in their congenital ache,
their first-thing-in-the-morning tale of woe--
but to go on is to belabor it,
your hypothetical end, your agnostic demise,
the groomed rows of data
on the actuarial table
which could have saved us all
this trouble, even if it couldn't save you from you.
Before this moment, and that,
in the other words of the past,
where you never really lived
nor in perfect truth did a single one of us,
the sun did your sweet bidding,
came when you called it,
and the clouds were strange, trained pets,
the good kinds, requiring no
effort on your part, no attention, nothing.

SINCERELY

Your rosy-fingered stevedore, your diligent crank,
your toxic asset, your uncle back in Malibu,
your aunt in Kittyhawk, your arcane symbol,
your broken clarinet, your lastborn, squirming
wildly in his swaddled birthright, your
instant message, your itemized brokenness,
your list of lost things, your forgotten abandonments,
your cast-offs, your too-small ring,
your finger bruised by the door,
your bruise in the night, which is not like
a bruise, though once this was
asserted, once this was written down,
sent to you, once this did seem right
to a lot of people, your aggrieved body mass index,
which scolds you in the dark
like a little dog, your papers, your imprint,
your forgeries, all of them in a row,
plain to children who have no gifts to speak of,
your naked sentiments, shining
like vegetables, rinsed then peeled
then served to people who appeared starved,
your pocket's pathetic cargo,
lint you cursed, change you hoarded,
your idiopathic dreams,
your mottle of skin, your rotten rot,
whatever that was in
the sink, all its improbable taxonomies,
your continued presence,
your philosophical cold case,
your evasions, your returns, your holographic scams,
your angelic coteries,
their hymns like an aftershock
in which there is only stillness,
stillness like a rock, your rock, your wound.