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123 1. I will not write your elegy in the riots of light that mean midsummer’s arrived, and that you’ve been missing sixty-five days and sixty-six nights, and that I’ve, in the end, missed your wake because I was clear-as-if-you’d-warned-me sure you would see my face when you opened the door, dismissing misunderstanding, discussing mistake, perhaps shouting surprise! and uncorking champagne and undertaking explanations about where the hell you’ve been—not chasing poetry on volcanoes at all, not helpless in crevasse or hurt in ravine, not tucked inside the opposite edge of a burying world’s round in ground gone dun hounding Proserpine but here, fond, found. RHYMES FOR CRAIG JULIE SOPHIA PAEGLE 124 2. You’ve been hounding Proserpine, there, but she won’t be found— aren’t the seasons wrong? It’s past the break of spring— she should’ve kissed Dis goodbye; she should be, already, rising back to Ceres from that bargain ploughed ground, back to surface, bud, and air, from hope’s trenchant wild distopias, the not inconsiderable disjunctions of prayer in a world wrought from bargain, shades’ exchange—where is it written that only gods can deal? What about your child up here? Barely still a child, and real. Why should his need be swallowed with any lesser vehemence than those six crimson myth-lit, for the living rigged seeds? Each chance is paid too dearly, stark and wide with range of consequence , calendar—now, every spring falling can only mean this: harsh landing/hard center/mark/nearing/dark/worlds apart/Dis. 125 3. Disbanding. Disbarred, dissenter, disembark. Dishearten. Disciple . Disciplinary, disclosure, full or partial, the claimed closure of disco ball mirror, replete with points, each an aimed glory. You and a microphone: disarray lighting piecemeal, discretely . Indisposing hurry, how you’d constellate, how you’d discombobulate ; how you’d court the lone fury with chin lifted , mouthing doubt: how bad can night be? Now disconnect’s riffed over these days’ lapsed golds as if from that discord; but disenchantment ’s at the heart of this and of whatever old underworld lord has had it with the dissatisfactory or worse, cold, consolations of myth, lagging pageantries of pomegranate, time’s own chord. This line lost, seam undone—how’d you tell the taste?—of fading fate: 6 seeds eaten, my lip-synch, late; what’s left of your grace left inchoate. 126 4. 6 weeks gone. They’ve left off pursuing what trace you’d left: faint trail cleft by ravine cliff, odd bent branch—what counts as remnant in the midst of zilch. More corporeal: the inexorable morph of what wait signifies from rescue imminent to window closing to demands of augury (defy, defy)—in June’s lip-synch, delay amounts merely, to admission of disguise, pieces of performance adrift across skittered interval—could this be a hoax? You’re somewhere, wry, biding your time . . . better that than the more probable scenarios that each day die, having outlived their odds. Still, Search and Rescue should look for you behind each staged evasion that nods its aside before leaving. What is it to leave? The readiness is all, if—let’s agree—it’s all a planned cameo. Now let’s agree on another reach, also planned, another kind of extension grasped, that of a rescuing hand. 127 5. Another kind of extension, that demanded by myth where land surfaces from ocean floor through fire’s door. May 1st. Is it still April in Japan? Jackie is here, reading (you remember the plan— I told you on the phone, just before you left, just as if we’d talk again). We talked jobs, sons, presses, the stuff of futures, all that prospect brightening your voice— you’d ask about volcanoes, then give advice— who to read, teach, what to write—landscape, myth— what not—Rhyme!—I barely escaped with my life—needed a 12-step program just to stop writing sonnets—that old joke. I’d lost track of its source, voicing it so often over the years myself, it was a small shock to hear it in yours. 128 6. A...

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