Forrest Gander - As a Friend

Dust carving out interiors in the sky at sunset.

And was Coltrane really a pallbearer at Sydney Bechet’s funeral in Paris?

Was that a lie too?

Good news, Les. You’re pre-approved for a MasterCard.

Everything worthwhile in me. Cut out. I leave the house and feel even the trees bend away from my affliction.

The name of my beloved is Abyss.

You turned me on to François Villon who was an orphan like you. Who was, like you, schooled by monks. Villon, who killed a priest one night in a tavern because, he swore in court, the priest had blasphemed God.

Villon, that superb liar.

The subtlety of your visual attention. You could alert me or change the subject with a contraction of your iris.

Almost after you’ve walked past it, snagging the dirty Kleenex from the table and bending down, without slowing, to pick up a dead spider I noticed days ago and meant to sweep up and then forgot. That economy of your gestures. The multiplying purpose.

Natural strategist.

Love solves nothing, but your love made me appear to myself.

Remember when I was lying on your lap and you cleaned my ears with a Q-tip? What a strange, complex intimacy, your at once maternal and sexual tenderness.

The Transverse Lute Position.

Leon Thomas with Oliver Nelson in Berlin, yodeling through “Straight No Chaser.”

For the filmmaker, you took off your clothes and stretched out at the lake shore where the murky water lapped your side. Your eyes closed. Gorgeous drowned man. Practicing.

You would quote Thoreau on the wood thrush: “Whenever a man hears it… the gates of heaven are not shut against him.”

Each complex tone, a superposition of pure tones.

I remember discovering that you loved to have your eyebrows stroked. That was a novel sensation to me, stroking a man’s eyebrows. Somehow, it had never occurred to me.

You do not age. Someone else will watch me grow old.

I walk, invisibly mutilated, toward the mirror.

Whether I stand or sit or drive to the grocery, it seems I only stake out an incoherence.

The amethystine blue of your eyes , you said once.

I wake each morning exhausted.

If only routine would brush sensation aside.

Then there are doves cooing.

And I am still here.

Innumerable others

have survived much worse.

There are many events worse than a single death. Who am I

to stop going forward? To not even want to heal?

To fail to draw the skin over this wound.

But if to go on is to go without.

I a wraith.

If you don’t live it, Charlie Parker swore, it won’t come out of your horn.

Live what?

In the corner of the door jamb, the spider flings legfuls of web over the moth, spinning it around like a chunk of wood on a lathe. Who do you think I’m thinking of, Les?

I moved your chair and look! Two popcorn kernels that must have fallen from your lap the week before you died.

My encounter with what has been kept in store for me began the night you shut your breath off.

True love, wrote Walter Raleigh, is a durable fire in mind.

But how can I find you in that stupendous blaze?

Hanging between two nails in the garage, your Eagle Claw rod with its Shakespeare Alpha spinning reel. On another nail, the unopened package of thirty pound test Trilene line I gave you at Christmas.

François Villon, born in the year they burned Joan of Arc. You loved the poems Villon wrote for his friends in underworld slang.

Green, empty beer bottles glittering in the weeds and chicory beside the driveway.

Come here , you whispered, pulling me through the back door. I was raking leaves from the raspberries and found a nest of spring salamanders .

Your orange Off can under the bathroom sink. Even the memory of the smell immobilizes me. A surveyor’s cologne.

When I noticed the shrew quivering beside the garbage can by the driveway, I thought it was injured. I bent close before I saw it was dead, shaken by beetles devouring it from underneath. And I vomited beside it.

You not here to blame, I blame myself. You not here to flay, I flay myself.

Face in the mirror crumpled by grief.

Yeah, but listen to what Stein is saying: a rose is eros is a rose is eros .

Sweetest was your intimate impulse.

The twenty minutes and fifty seconds of “Harvest Time” on Pharoah Sanders’s album Pharoah . Spare broken chords, intensely felt cropped lines, and those emotional halts before his finishing phrases.

Pharoah. Born Farrell Sanders, just outside Little Rock.

When a sound wave enters the inner ear, cilia all along the cochlea’s length vibrate.

He’s excellent company , you would say about someone you liked. He’s serious good news .

For my birthday you gave me a stick with the dry foam cloud of a praying mantis egg sack attached to it.

At ease in honesty , you praised me: very rare .

What bothers me, I told you in the first weeks after we met, is that I never know when you think I’m interesting.

Now , you said. When you say things like that .

The empty nail in the wall by the back door where you hung your tattered duck-cloth jacket.

I’m reading about a woman who, before she was taken captive by Pawnees, managed to hide her baby under a bush near her house. When she returned from captivity, she found its bones there.

Your marriage was over, you told me. Over. It went dead in the bed .

The silence of the house has intensified. What woke me last night were snails scraping up the window glass.

The Fetching Fire Behind the Hill Position.

We penciled our silhouettes on the bedroom wall by candlelight. Holding the candle, you drew me lying on my back — forehead, nose, chin, collarbone, breast, nipple. And then I traced your silhouette, not facing mine, as you wanted, but also on your back, merged with mine. A double landscape. Inside each other.

Where are those conversations that awed me, that made me howl? Now when only they could save me.

I’m gagging on the hours.

When Cora came to the house, the night before you died, she forced her way into the bedroom. When she saw the silhouettes, her face uncolored. I knew you’d done the same thing with her, that in her own bedroom your candle-lit silhouette and hers were merged on the wall.

Your marriage wasn’t over. Over. Wasn’t dead in the bed . Was it?

In every photograph, your soul has exited from your face.

What’s wrong with me that I trusted you. What’s wrong with me that I didn’t save you. That I was so lost, I didn’t see what was happening. Didn’t stop you. I made you think I despised you. In your last hours on earth I spewed contempt on you. How could you not know it would pass? That my hatred was only a form of relief to have the truth out. And you didn’t even grant me that. You snatched it away. You jammed your guilt so far down my throat it became my own and when will I stop suffocating on it?

The obscenity of hair in the brush buried in your drawer in the bathroom cabinet.

Bésame mucho . You laughed, It doesn’t just mean kiss .

Stubbing your shoulder against the door frame.

I fatally opened myself on a poem. You are its name.

To say that after you died, I kept breathing. That weeks went by, that I ate meals, looked at a newspaper, slept in a bed with my head on the pillow. That I smiled at someone responsively. That I acted as though .

Just past breakfast, a week after my birthday, the mantis nymphs came out in a frenzy, hundreds of them, scrambling across the porch rail, stalking and eating each other. Mantes , you said when I called you to see, you probably know it’s the Greek word for prophet. And what’s the prophecy? The world begins and ends in violence .