Forrest Gander - As a Friend

On TV, footage of the refugees pushed back out to sea in their tawdry boat. What would you say, Les?

I notice the left rear tire of your truck losing air in the driveway and rage reddens my face like a niacin rush.

Contrary to what they tell me, my return to ordinary life is neither stepwise nor slow. There is no return.

Can you see how the primroses have grown through the fence?

Sweetest was the kissing.

Who by fire, who by water , you by your own hand.

To get out of the house, I sat in the backyard yesterday, wearing sandals and sunglasses. Drank tequila and read your poems. Now the tops of my feet are striped with burn. The inside of me striped with burn.

Bitches Brew , Miles Davis. You loved the subtle changes in his dynamics.

When I practice the cello, I listen to what I can leave out.

The first time I heard you talk, I thought: he is speaking about my feelings, he is speaking in my stead, he knows everything.

They say the South American ghost eel makes a high-pitched piercing hum. Sometimes, it seems like the air around me must be full of them. Invisible. Screaming.

In your underwear drawer, I found an uncut geode. Everything means something, what does this mean? A memento? A present for someone? For me?

That first morning when you slept in my bed, I woke before you. And waking was the climax denied me all night.

You came back with honeysuckle from the mailbox post, pinched off the ends, and put two, a dark yellow and a white blossom, in each of our coffee cups. Cuts the bitterness , you smiled.

What made you think you could be left out?

The things you did dazzled me. But you shared them with others. The things you did dazzled others. But you shared them with me.

You open your hand and satisfy desire . I read that in Psalms and thought of you. Your long middle finger.

The yard’s gone Mondrian with primroses , you said.

The Goat and Tree Position.

The old men are snag fishing for gar at the lake again.

When I compare the gloom inside the house with the darkness outside it, I find a way to simplify myself.

“Seven Steps to Heaven,” Miles Davis.

Time is what the stars shine through .

And the brain determines pitch by the stimulated hair cells.

His hispidulous chin?! Is that what you said? That’s not a word, try again.

It humps its wings like that when it feels threatened .

The rest of us made you the point where our astonishments and our projections converged.

On your desk: a fossil ammonite, tobacco-colored ink, a fountain pen, a shriveled walnut you compared once to an angel’s scrotum.

Whoa. Not an owl, Horned Owl. Back up. Real slow .

Let me tell you about life without you.

The sound of leaves falling down through leaves. A night jar tongue-clicking while I’m too exhausted to sleep.

“Time After Time,” Miles Davis. The spare broken chords make a kind of floating echo effect.

Just after you died, I missed my period.

Glair. That’s whipped egg white. They used it as a binder for illuminated manuscripts. To get the right froth, Blake probably squeezed egg white in and out of a sponge for an hour .

I thought I was pregnant.

That you’d bequeathed me your baby.

But it was grief. Only that.

Try again.

Is that Hamlet holding up your skull?

The purple finch rubbing an ant along its outer primaries, from wrist to tip.

The bushes scandent with white berries.

My last birthday. The living room unlit. I suspected a surprise, but before I could reach the light switch, you struck a match to the horse skull you’d hung from the ceiling and doused with lighter fluid. It was the most beautiful thing I ever saw. The slow liquid-blue flame in the shape of a horse’s skull flowering into a new dimension, turning slowly on a string in the dark.

I have been sitting here in a corner of The High Hat for hours like a blind dog. No one is coming to lead me away. I don’t want to drink. I push a ten-dollar bill to the corner of the table so I can continue to sit.

The light moves away from me.

You bastard, you fucking bastard, how could you quit and leave me like this, rotting in my drool and incapacity, like a flap of cardboard in a swamp.

Webworms have gauzed our cherry tree.

It doesn’t only mean kiss me a lot , you laughed.

Sweetest Les. Damaged Les.

I hit my brakes the instant I saw the raccoon.

But I couldn’t stop the car.

Those eyes. Beyond panic.

The mirror on my bureau, I tilted it down.

Who in due time? Who before his time?

Half a dozen crows mobbing a red-tailed hawk. What kind of sign is that? What are you telling me?

Within ten minutes of meeting, we’d exchanged love letters from the corners of our eyes.

Desire, they say, is made of many desires. But my desires are made of one desire.

Whether opening the window lets more flies out or in.

Staring for an hour at crumbs in the seam of a book.

The hiss of the world against me.

Your moleskin notebooks. I can’t bear to read them or put them away.

A thorn bug and her nymphs on the green stem.

Villon, who wrote his own epitaph as a ballad.

This one’s filled with your neat, tiny handwritten notes on Coleridge.

At sunset the doves flock into our oaks and coo. They make so much noise,

the neighborhood dogs begin to howl.

When you were alive.

Under the shrew’s body, the maggots were legion. The valves of their mouths opening and closing rapidly after the beetles scattered.

Was I kicking? Did I wake you?

Pharoah Sanders humming through the piccolo while he blows “Lower Egypt.”

Itys, that’s what you named the baby barn swallow under our porch eave.

How gently you would open and close the door not to alarm the mother bird.

And wouldn’t let me turn on the porch light that spring.

The pizza delivery boy saying, I couldn’t find your house.

Reaching for the little bottle of massage oil beside the bed, grabbing the wrong one

in the dark, you laved my clitoris with Tiger Balm.

Why Itys? I asked you.

I drape a scarf over the mirror so as not to see my face accidentally.

The sound , you said, serious, it’s the sound. When the mother returns to the nest, you hear her peeping Itys, Itys, Itys .

I can no longer listen to Pharoah Sanders.

Can’t sell the records.

Or give them away.

Or imagine anyone else listening to “Upper and Lower Egypt.”

The hiss and pop: you in the kitchen frying eggs.

I dragged your record player to the basement. Brought it up again.

Bright Moments , Rahsaan Roland Kirk:

Yes, yes.

Bright moments.

Bright moments is like hearing some music that ain’t nobody else heard,

and if they heard it they wouldn’t even recognize that they heard it

because they been hearing it all their life but they nutted on it,

so when you hear it and you start popping your feet and jumping up and down

they get mad because you’re enjoying yourself but those are bright moments

that they can’t share with you

because they don’t know even how to go about listening to what you’re listening to

and when you try to tell them about it

they don’t know a damn thing about what you’re talking about!

In the bucket of your mouth

you brought me water.

The lulling of doves.

Each day, your death’s woven into fact and each night, I let out the knots.

In bed, alone, in the dark, I fly toward you.

And through you.

This spring I see, dangling from the arborvitae, dozens of bagworm cocoons. Tiny mummies.