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Elegy
In North Oakland you followed your key up 39 steps,
ignored pigmentation, refused to be called sir.
Al Caesar Mercer who weathered three wars,
walked on streets with nothing there to become
the cracked face connected to the same history
that held you up. Your fish had names, 3 wives,
a marriage to a communist in the Philippines
you let the Navy annul as your ship pulled out.
How can anyone forget what they should have done?
In the dark light of your apartment living room
We talked about those days when we had nothing--
sitting up on your couch waiting for relief.
Our faces reflected nothing more
than the bottom of a drained lake.
Away to school in the middle of the Midwest
one never quite knows oneself from memory,
things no longer as modern as they used to be.
An exile can become any one of us,
the custom of sameness distorting the boundary between
what is surely there and what is likely not--
like these snowmen staggered in the snow.
Inside the bar this night a crazy woman
dances to the jukebox, toasting her old lover
as the phone I keep calling repeats:
the number you have dialed…the number you have dialed.
Form becomes an accident of the mind,
and I pass a death sentence on whom?
Here your death means nothing less
than our own, the knowledge
you could give to another, a day
of restitution from the chaos we ordered.
What can I say? What can anyone, ever?
You were the North Pole--my guide.
Should I claim it as your metaphor?
Will that image let you go? Our struggle
remains, frozen with a heart to fill a lake.
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