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This particular elegy is
for a good friend of mine

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who died an entirely
too young of an age,

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if there is ever a good age
for one's friends to die.

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And there's an epigraph at the
beginning of it from Lucretius.

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I don't know who the translator
is, because I've remembered

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these lines since I was 16.

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And I may even have changed
them, but who knows?

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But it's, "winnowed along the
Earth or whirled along the sky,

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life lives on.

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It is the lives, the
lives, the lives that die."

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"The Music We Dance To"

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"For instance, the last
time I saw my friend alive--

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though I didn't know
it was the last time,

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or I would have said
something, put a wedge

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in the revolving door to stop
its pains from breaking up

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her sandy hair, turning
her reflection out

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into the New York City street.

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But perhaps not, for I've always
liked the apocryphal Saint

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Francis who, asked how he
would spend his last day,

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answered, keep on
hoeing the garden.

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So perhaps knowingly,
I would still

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have given Beth the flowers
that others had given me.

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An over-generous bouquet
mingling the blooms

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of summer and of spring,
their conflicting fragrances,

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odd lengths of stem, falling
over into the porcelain

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box full of water.

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I didn't know what
to do with them.

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I was leaving for
Seattle and couldn't

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imagine carrying
that severed field

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sloshing to the other
side of the continent.

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Beth's arms were empty.

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She had helped pick
the flowers, was,

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in a sense transporting
them back to their origins,

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back to the impulse that
at first sent them to me.

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And she gathered them
up gladly, maneuvering

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their fragile coronas through
the narrowness of the glass

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door.

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I don't mean to
suggest her going was

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anything like Persephone
being swept out of view,

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the flowers falling back to
Earth, dissevered, dying.

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It was a real cab she
got into, not the one

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we invented the night before
to escape a boring crowd.

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When we talked about the habit
people have of disappearing,

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we meant how our
chums from college

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had wanted to go home too early.

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Though it wasn't a home but some
hotel or friend's apartment.

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We had all been able
to meet precisely

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because we were away from
home, had vacated its premises,

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assumed a somewhere else
behind or ahead of us

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where we would be awaited with
longing like those smog rings

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Demeter hoarded to
outlast the winter.

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In my hotel room, we kept
on talking while I packed.

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Then a moment of quiet like
the wound that uprooted

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leaves in the
Earth began eroding

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into canyons, abysmal rips.

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Much later, I was to connect the
ease with which she had slipped

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away to the cancer, its
blood red sea beginning

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to sprout as it must have been
possible so long ago to hear

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the grasses being
crushed beneath the rim

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of that black chariot wheel
when the Lord of the Underworld

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coasted into view.

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I kept packing, cramming
everything into my suitcase,

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reminded of how Unamuno said,
'we were all travelers who

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stuffed whatever we could into
our luggage then trimmed away

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what did not fit,' though
it was the night itself that

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the clock's fluorescent hands
were pruning down to nothing.

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In the morning, when
she ran toward a cab,

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pulled away forever
from the curb,

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I remembered how in college,
we always danced together

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to I Heard It Through
the Grapevine,

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the same way I would hear of her
death, called from a warm bath

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to the phone, thinking it was
a joke as the chilling water

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dripped and pooled on
the floor around me.

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The last time I danced with her,
we were holding hands, 20 or so

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of us in a line
of bodies whirling

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through a darkened student
union, the Charlie Chaplin

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movie flickering on the opposite
wall, mingling our hands,

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our faces, with bits
of the tramp's twirling

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cane, his sad expression.

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I followed Beth's white blouse,
an ordinary white blouse,

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as we rushed ahead, but
she didn't pull me along.

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It was the momentum
of the circle itself,

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the force of those
sleeping bodies,

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a merry go round of flesh
linked hand to hand to the one

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before and the one after, a
wheel like that other wheel,

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black spokes, rim of iron,
moving faster and faster

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until the velocity, the whip
effect at the end of the line,

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began to snap us off one by
one flying into the darkness."

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