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.