Because i love you, and you are alive, an elegy

 

It’s been a day like a Wednesday and all day

it’s felt like evening. No one’s come to flip

the switch on every unlit street lamp, yet.

Even damned cars are peaceful. It’s the wind,

 

this wind in the public park as I lay against

a tree’s dark root. People move from blanket

to art piece to fountains and back. Not a word.

Geniuses at their pillows. Dogs take the streets.

 

It’s this sky, right now, I wish you were seeing.

How each separate branch moves with a power

like hope. Each dark leaf working a hypothesis.

Today is the day I decide to ask God for strength

 

to love haphazardly as this, even if you forget me.

Even if my eyelids collapse around your picture

and never open again. A mourning mouth nurses

your name’s syllables and when I wake it’s ready.

 

Disappeared, too, all the future pages of poems

I meant to write you. Tongues hid in the back

of never opened doors. A small family of mice

lives in my shirt, nibbling at me day and night.

 

Your hands sunk into mine, as you would lean

your light snowbank frame along my barn.
The pleasant hazel river of your eyes I swam,

once. And, we both agree, was forever changed.

 

You gave the hugs that accumulate like Karma.

Entering a room, I felt like all my good deeds

had come to bear. It’s a fear, my not lowering

my head, to miss any rumor of your presence.

 

But, the joy I used to carry in my side pocket,

worry rock, cracks underneath the discipline.

Patience was what you loved most about me.

Every regret is a government under revolt.

 

It cannot persist. I laugh knowing you’re well,

somewhere, in the world. This humbling world

in which I am not allowed to hear your voice.

This world of salted battlefields, empty sounds.

 

I won’t refuse the signs of beauty anymore.

Our struggles broke like an algebra of pigeons

flying obscure vectors into the public heavens.

I want that special ethos of mountain-climbers:

 

when both of us finally reached the far summit

that was to be our life together we looked back

to realize a journey that’s only half-way done.

Now, the deep color of our day’s final hours.