Elegy for a Nightstand in the Back of a U-Haul

Elegy for a Nightstand in the Back of a U-Haul

It could have been anyone’s, but wasn’t.                 It could have been tagged for a buck fifty   in your aunt’s garage sale or just as easily set out on the curb             for a junkman to collect and do God knows what with,     but no—         hastily given to one poet who,   years later,       in a gesture of real antiquity,           traded it, with ceremony, for a clothbound copy of Georg Trakl   my friend, by odd chance, had in triplicate—                 this is treasured cargo, the hard-copy fact of an apostolic succession otherwise only presumed   and reeking, faintly, of Vaseline and vodka.

He delivers it up to me with a tenderness given to nothing else they own,       and I tuck it square between a crate stack     of grease-smeared kitchen bric-a-brac, a chopping block, and futon.         When I tie the section off, my slipknot joins its myth cycle.

So long, last, local remains of Larry Levis—       following him, finally, out of Missouri     and toward, always toward, the reparation of what is broken.

But that was 1980 or so when he fled,       back when sorrows could keep a peculiar dignity,         before lives were digitized and overshared,     when one’s failures went,           like the average good man’s private life,       to gloss the Pillars of Hercules,                 no further beyond       the compass of those one’s hurt.            When what stayed in the bar, and even what didn’t,       traveled at the pace of its own disclosing,     could afford to wait, like all domestic pacts,             for the words to describe it to arrive,         for their organic, preordained dispersal.

As Brodsky liked to say, poets do better than most at finding grounds         for infidelity; so long as somehow art is served.   Still, a man driving off with what worldly belongings     fit in his trunk         is always and forever just one more man       driving off.         My father taught me this.

Where was I the night he died     alone in a spare apartment,       no doubt the finer spirit         of all knowledge on his breath?   In my own lonely rented basement space, probably       cooking beans and rice and soothing           a well-heeled self-pity:             failing day by day to finish anything,         newly fired, caught in flagrante           with a lunch-shift waitress             on the couch after hours in the office   of the Mexican joint where I schlepped margaritas and salsa           and in free moments studied poems     cribbed on yellow note cards. I’d like to hope that he, like me—           like the cunning of history,     like Providence itself, like whatever hatches its reversals                 in the nest of our miseries—       passed that night in uncalculated silence.

But now, those pains all spleen-absorbed,   all that spent nerve that never made the leap to art, or grief         that never added up to anything     but hours in bed or on my knees,             proving the lie               so many well-intentioned     people tell: that all things work for good. Some things do add up to nothing.

  But little of this matters, this late-June day.     As I labor for perfection inside the sweltering          hollow belly of a moving truck,     donating my sweat and gift of geometrical imagination           to the cause, I am convinced of only one true cause —to help a beloved soul move on—              (what other faith survives?)           and though we like to say it comes too soon,       in fact we’re doomed to see it coming,               and to sometimes joy in hastening it along.