Elegy for Chad, and: Sweetwater
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Elegy for Chad
Instead of aim, fire, repeat, just give me the gold bulletto swallow. I want to taste its fingerprints, tonguethe story of those who forged this death, tracetheir loved ones’ names along my gum lines.Instead, I wear a gas mask around town, sketchthe faces of my enemies on storefront windowsand walk away while the sun waxes them clean.I’m auditioning to be the oldest man in townshouting thunder at the bone-light, sorrow into uncountablesorrows. I say: to even say psalm is to say I’ve no ideahow to grieve. (Ask any saint: act one way long enoughit comes true.) (Skip to the end of the book and everything isimpossible.) (Friend, in Latin, originally meant one who walks with youto the edge of water and lifts it for you to drink.)Last week a murder of birds dropped beneathan acid lake. I too want to remember what it was liketo breathe arsenic. For the ones who loved me mostto be a row of bones under an overgrown hill. MaybeI’ll make my bed there, sleep with thorns in my mouth,whisper rumors of war and ruin, let them know I’m alivebegging not to be, beating the earth like whale skin, hotmetal, anything strong enough to echo me backward.Most people pray too long for a quick, quiet cancer. I only want to hold a seahorse’s heart until its little rhythm ends, learn how a story can bekept alive by something no bigger than a period on this page. [End Page 169]
Sweetwater
Give me a town where there is morethan one way home, empty pocketsat the billiard hole, homing pigeonsshot straight out of the sky. A placewhere we bow to The Badnessas Zeus-armed kids melt a cityof widows, one living woman’s gravenext to her dead husband’s that boasts“I won.” Tell me we don’t belong a little biteverywhere. How we can only prayto the dead. Little act, but everyoneis dying. And a voice we find so oftennot our own, the way we wake upand can’t remember where,or it’s 2006 and suddenly everythingis as much mirror as the objecta mirror kisses back. How a motherbecomes her child and waits like godfor the world to get better, ghost of a futureself she can approach, unzip, step inside.Tell me we can be wrong all our livesand still, in some way, have it right.Maybe we’ll be allowed to be dragon.Maybe we’ll be born againin 1906, drunk on the futureof motor oil and boys in love with the warthat didn’t love them. We sent them therejust to have everything we love come backlike yard dogs, bones ribbed into railroad tracks,entire countries of fear where the dead, like foxes,stay inside. See? We can pay for everything.The new world is good & mad, honey. [End Page 170]
Jeff Whitney is the author of five chapbooks, two of which were co-written with Philip Schaefer. Recent poems can be found in 32 Poems, Booth, Muzzle, Thrush, and reprinted on Verse Daily. He lives in Portland.
Philip Schaefer’s first collection of poems Bad Summon (U of Utah P) won the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize. He is the author of three chapbooks, two of which were co-written with friend and poet Jeff Whitney. He won the 2016 Meridian Editor’s Prize in poetry and has work out or due out in Kenyon Review, Thrush Poetry Journal, Guernica, the Cincinnati Review, Salt Hill, Bat City Review, the Adroit Journal, Baltimore Review, and Passages North among others. He tends bar in Missoula, MT.
