Elegy for Daniel

(1970-2001)

After the bullet discharges through the tunnel of his mouth,

after it shatters

the Oklahoma evening, rips through ragweed & across many rivers,

my apartment in Pittsburgh,

the metal clips my arm, slams into a plaster wall,

& the silence is his

body slackening & the black fact of the gun underwater.

I compress my wound as his ghost kneels beside his body,

the bathtub, &

as his ghost draws the shower curtain back,

I look away. No, I don’t want to know his secrets, why

surer hands will tag, bag as evidence.

He is a poet. He makes the difficult question of speaking

a matter of remembering

how he shouted the poems he loved.

His outbursts were pure country. Yes, rumors circulated,

how vets suffer

medication, what he saw as a S.E.A.L., how weird,

& no one could stand

the belabored way he read aloud,

& I said all the above & more, & to his face

when no one was around when he finally caught on,

I asked him, ‘Why are you quieter? I’ve noticed, & it scares me.’

Even now I’m busy with details, the dirty work of gathering.

Here’s rosemary & some pansies, that’s for thoughts

rambled to me one Fall afternoon, Cathedral of Learning,

how Komunyakaa showed him a way to anchor a moment

between stillness & approach

turning toward tall grass or a woman’s wet hair to braid,

or how it could lock arms with an enemy,

lose to an overwhelming grasp, or listen to the dying

echo of paradise birds singing

so much gibberish, as if a whole life could be reduced to one image

dangling from a fist & engraved with a number,

as if a poem wants only to be identified upon delivery,

which was why Daniel read Blake,

Calvino & Crane for fire & crystal. Why he shut himself up

with Bishop. Why Stern’s huge breath,

why Oppen, Tu Fu & Paz. Lewis & Vollmer mattered

for their generosities, lines layered like the earth

in his face,

the reds & browns of his voice deepening to what he pursued,

half-formed in haze

& burrowing underneath to avoid tripwire, & Daniel yelling as he

plunged after its gray, disappearing shape.

I listen to his ghost pace the hallway as if barefoot across dirt,

fronds like unfurled scrolls, rustle.

Root scent & rainfall stain his cheeks with welcome, risk.

He has walked far to finish this conversation between us.

He brushes against the wood, taps the doorknob trying to explain

the jagged web of cracks in my wall,

hot metal at the center like a labyrinth chamber

or the slick tip of a widow

hunched over & spinning a bundle or the pure ore from a journey

toward sublimation, a soul’s treasure,

or the soul, itself, lodged in a network & inconsolable

because wings never guaranteed perfect pitch.

Daniel, the scar on my arm fades as I read your poems again,

& the maps you drew

time spackles over for a move out west.

The twenty that someone taped to my office desk for flowers

remains unspent,

a bookmarker for a Ramses biography.

I tried. I couldn’t find your permanent address.

Daniel, the news today proclaims disaster, code orange to survive

for tomorrow’s headline

that you were right could, at any moment, slip under a thicket,

emerge skittish beside a pile of leaves,

its long gray nose & black eyes focused on your movements.

How you wrote it down, my friend, held it

in the starless night

& gave it pink fingers with which to scratch back.

Source: Paper Pavilion (White Pine Press, 2007)

Veterans Day Poems