LOST FOR WORDS

You loved, in those long ago days, to discover
new words and phrases, slipping them into a poem
or a simple note taped to the refrigerator door,
so that I -- unassuming student -- would inevitably
reach for your old college dictionary, standing
upright in the dusty kitchen window sill.
Nights we whiled away with the warm flush
of bourbon, cutthroat games of Scrabble, scrutinizing
and solving the world's problems one by one.
In the morning, more often than not,
your post-it notes covered the bathroom mirror,
bright yellow flags stamped with your precise cursive,
your sudden insights and asides, inside jokes,
things to remember, things to forget,
a small "I love you" to start the work day.
So strange, then, that you have left with neither
goodbye nor instruction, only the dull fact
of your absence saturating every page,
every secret space from curtain fold to closet.
I am reading outside of your lines now,
the best I can, one silence intersecting with another,
piecing together one version of you to one
I cannot quite comprehend -- nervous, as I was
back then, to share my lines with you.
What word might you offer if you could, what coin
for safe passage from this winter without color,
without snow, this world without you in it?
I am only learning to speak in this uncertain air.
I am, I must confess, at a loss.

BETWEEN THE WARS

You always said that you were born into the wrong era -- the age of intangible monetization and the quick fix, of information without wisdom, and sex without intimacy, the age of self-branding and dumbing down. You still liked an old-fashioned date and an old-fashioned drink, talking long into the night about books and movies, the kind of music they just didn't make anymore, casually stating your many opinions as though long-settled fact. You loved most Paris between the wars, the lost generation living just outside the mainstream, and those angry young men in England trudging through their working class lives in bleak sepia and gray, and the beautiful façade of Hollywood in the 40s -- a nation unto itself -- the high waists and low-tilted hats, the clipped and razor-sharp dialogue of no discernible accent, lines you could have easily written yourself. You wanted, simply, to be elsewhere, corresponding by hand on fine cream-colored vellum -- the one small luxury you would allow yourself -- signing off in your witty, offhand way, anxiously awaiting reply, and never using a word as gauche as Goodbye, not even once.

NOW THAT YOU HAVE FLOWN

Now that you have flown from your body,

flown as if every hidden room within were burning

behind and beneath you, flown as if the life

you were fleeing somehow depended upon it,

I remember your body as it once was:

small, resilient, open to love and to touch,

smelling of summer sun, of sweat-salt

and sweet musk, the residue of perfumed candles

left unattended on the dresser all night.

I think of your thin fingers laced between mine,

the very simplicity of their union, and how

our bodies folded into one another during sleep,

then shifted, drifting apart like continents

inching slowly toward their separate worlds.

But you were always an escape artist

in training -- never content with the vehicle

you were granted in this life, walking

slightly out of step beside it, or pulling it

behind you like a child's Radio Flyer.

You wanted most, you said, to be merely a mind,

or at least the spirit that lays claim to it.

You quarreled with it, punished it with bourbon

and precision neglect, forgave it grudgingly,

if not yourself -- an argument only you understood.

But now that you have flown from all of this,

painless and weightless at last, I can touch you

only in my thoughts, can see you and speak

to you only in these lines, rising like the thinnest

plumes of smoke, drawing the shape of a bird,

then of a woman, then a bird once more,

dissipating, wisp by wisp, into air.

PROOF

 

My grief cannot be

reasoned with.

It demands that

you come back

in order to prove

that you are

truly gone.