from Elegy

Part Three

1.

Police speckle campus lawns, their cars parked Ostentatiously, illegally, public exhibits In an open-air museum of broken hearts.

Their gun-metal charm sets me on edge. The ones in plain clothes stand out even more, Their inconspicuous intent is itself conspicuous.

Bless them for their crude cover of us in our raw state. We believe in nothing but slowness when in the open, For the sun as it slips cloud cover, startles with its glare.

And no man, woman or child looks quite so lost, As when left to idle before an impromptu memorial, By an impulse that stays one step ahead of thinking.

What am I thinking when I catch my self in its stasis? That love’s cloak keeps us warm in a crisis.

2.

That the sun had no malicious intent until now, As we move in our skin-scrubbed-raw condition, Our eyelids peeled back to show too much white,

Our feet sore from walking on shingle That fell like rain all over town while some Army sneaked in and took away our shoes.

Some of us walk on our hands for comfort Others tiptoe and the people in pairs give Each other piggybacks – better one pair of feet,

Than two, better still if this sun can be turned Back to a time when the half moons of fingernails Kept us busy, and the big picture was a CNN catastrophe:

A man going over Niagara Falls in a barrel; A medical team undoing the reef knot of conjoined twins.

3.

I avoid the news in all its formats and stick With friendly testimony, tongues grow Wild as vines watered by rumor run wild.

Truth is mugged, hardly a mugging, a baby Whose only true possession, innocence, Cannot be taken away, though something’s lost:

An image of a youngster at the start of a road That twists out of sight, and all those springy Legs need do is embark on this life journey.

That’s gone, for an image of a road with chasms So deep that long lines of youth surge down Unawares, and their parents look on helplessly.

We count the cost afterwards, astonished at the toll; The roads that lead, not to long lives, but early burials.

4.

There was a joke about the shooter students Loved to tell, before it blew up in their faces: Did you hear the one about…that I can’t repeat

Here and desecrate the names of the fallen. Humor sits next to prediction, the two occupy Sides of a coin thrown into the middle of lives

Without knowing which lands face up, and us Face the consequence, in this case a lone man In a VT hat and reflective shades plotting

His glory at a price many among us pay For with our lives, and the rest of us left With a gamble, ask, what are the chances

That this would happen here and now, In a county where people barely outnumber cows.

5.

The last time I laugh without checking my Laughter at the door of abandonment, laugh Unbridled, is the morning of the sixteenth

Before I catch up with the news and get Caught up in it. I tell a colleague the story From my secondary school days of a friend

Who pulls up his fly zip with automatic zeal And catches a piece of himself in the zip And none of us, in stitches, helps him

With it and he ends up going to the emergency, Where a nurse he fancies manhandles him, And frees him from his misery and he boasts

That he stirs with lust for her as she touches him Instead of the boy we leave with her that’s screaming.

6.

I tell this now to show the light years of events Before and after that date and how when I laugh At anything there’s a sour taste left in my mouth,

Whose corners, turned up for laughter, could just As easily flip into the mask I wear just beneath Every expression; that tinges everything I do,

From picking up my child...