This particular elegy is for a good friend of mine
who died an entirely too young of an age,
if there is ever a good age for one's friends to die.
And there's an epigraph at the beginning of it from Lucretius.
I don't know who the translator is, because I've remembered
these lines since I was 16.
And I may even have changed them, but who knows?
But it's, "winnowed along the Earth or whirled along the sky,
life lives on.
It is the lives, the lives, the lives that die."
"The Music We Dance To"
"For instance, the last time I saw my friend alive--
though I didn't know it was the last time,
or I would have said something, put a wedge
in the revolving door to stop its pains from breaking up
her sandy hair, turning her reflection out
into the New York City street.
But perhaps not, for I've always liked the apocryphal Saint
Francis who, asked how he would spend his last day,
answered, keep on hoeing the garden.
So perhaps knowingly, I would still
have given Beth the flowers that others had given me.
An over-generous bouquet mingling the blooms
of summer and of spring, their conflicting fragrances,
odd lengths of stem, falling over into the porcelain
box full of water.
I didn't know what to do with them.
I was leaving for Seattle and couldn't
imagine carrying that severed field
sloshing to the other side of the continent.
Beth's arms were empty.
She had helped pick the flowers, was,
in a sense transporting them back to their origins,
back to the impulse that at first sent them to me.
And she gathered them up gladly, maneuvering
their fragile coronas through the narrowness of the glass
door.
I don't mean to suggest her going was
anything like Persephone being swept out of view,
the flowers falling back to Earth, dissevered, dying.
It was a real cab she got into, not the one
we invented the night before to escape a boring crowd.
When we talked about the habit people have of disappearing,
we meant how our chums from college
had wanted to go home too early.
Though it wasn't a home but some hotel or friend's apartment.
We had all been able to meet precisely
because we were away from home, had vacated its premises,
assumed a somewhere else behind or ahead of us
where we would be awaited with longing like those smog rings
Demeter hoarded to outlast the winter.
In my hotel room, we kept on talking while I packed.
Then a moment of quiet like the wound that uprooted
leaves in the Earth began eroding
into canyons, abysmal rips.
Much later, I was to connect the ease with which she had slipped
away to the cancer, its blood red sea beginning
to sprout as it must have been possible so long ago to hear
the grasses being crushed beneath the rim
of that black chariot wheel when the Lord of the Underworld
coasted into view.
I kept packing, cramming everything into my suitcase,
reminded of how Unamuno said, 'we were all travelers who
stuffed whatever we could into our luggage then trimmed away
what did not fit,' though it was the night itself that
the clock's fluorescent hands were pruning down to nothing.
In the morning, when she ran toward a cab,
pulled away forever from the curb,
I remembered how in college, we always danced together
to I Heard It Through the Grapevine,
the same way I would hear of her death, called from a warm bath
to the phone, thinking it was a joke as the chilling water
dripped and pooled on the floor around me.
The last time I danced with her, we were holding hands, 20 or so
of us in a line of bodies whirling
through a darkened student union, the Charlie Chaplin
movie flickering on the opposite wall, mingling our hands,
our faces, with bits of the tramp's twirling
cane, his sad expression.
I followed Beth's white blouse, an ordinary white blouse,
as we rushed ahead, but she didn't pull me along.
It was the momentum of the circle itself,
the force of those sleeping bodies,
a merry go round of flesh linked hand to hand to the one
before and the one after, a wheel like that other wheel,
black spokes, rim of iron, moving faster and faster
until the velocity, the whip effect at the end of the line,
began to snap us off one by one flying into the darkness."