A Final Elegy

i. Burying the Dead

Spring, as I have said, was never my best season.
This April saw you disappear from me, my Fool,
my lost keeper, my brother, my best friend, the reason
still unclear to me, or else forgotten. Cruel
that Spring in all its strange abundance leaves you stopped
dead, a broken watch that somebody has dropped

one too many times, while I must stay to bear
a thousand sympathetic cliches, a thousand "grin"
and bear it's." Just like yours, the smile that I wear
is pasted on, no more real than a mannequin's.
I look into the mirror. The lines across my face
are like road maps or memories time can't erase --

too deeply etched to ever really bury, permanent
as a Michelangelo and cracking like cement.

ii. The Feast

This Spring you held a banquet in my honor, in
my absence, in my house. You welcomed in the dead
like old forgotten friends, like courtesans from Paris,
and you satisfied your hungers. You all raised such a din!
I had to burn the bedsheets where you'd slept -- the bed
smelled warm and musty, and I'm so easily embarrassed,

so easily reminded of the orgy here.
The dead fold up like suitcases and disappear.

iii. The Will

Funny that I've made you my inheritor --
you, who pass away ahead of me, you take
and keep my livelihood with you into the grave.
You, my face of clouds, my laughing shrink, my knave,
grab the booty and leave me a penniless debort
with an idiot's grin and a palsied handshake.

And all these things I bequeathed to you by forfeit:
the proverbial shirt off my back you never bothered
to return, the nights we stayed up talking and sorted
the annals of your case history like photographs, the aborted
plans for a bike trip in late May (I even let
you keep my beat-up ten-speed), the soul that smothered.

So much for the Spring and the bike with broken parts.
So much for friendships. So much for hearts.

iv. An Offering for the Dead

Place a gold coin underneath your tongue; you'll need
it in the future. The death I designate you, I know,
is purely metaphor; your body still awakens
at the touch of a woman's hands; your eyes still grow
wide as teacups later recounting the incident
to the crowds of your admirers, the throng you lead.

But keep this gold coin in your mouth. Never swallow
it; never surrender it to those who follow
with hooded faces and would drag you to your death.
Inhale, exhale all that gold with every breath.

February 2-3, 1990