For Tony Hoagland

All that’s obvious now is how much light

You’ve taken with you into the dark,

My lively, spirited, truth-telling friend.

But in time, if time is with me,

I’ll be glad for every episode

I manage to pull from the dark,

Every proof that I bring you with me.

Now it will be a chore to attend your memorial.

I don’t need the memories of your other friends

To round out my own, others all laboring

Under the sad delusion they knew you

As well as I did. But in time,

When this gust of competitive grief blows by,

I’ll hear you saying, Wait it out, Carlo.

Soon you’ll be glad they want to join the ritual

Of urging each other to remember me.

Now I want to focus only on the give-and-take

Of our private dialogues, not on your poems,

Those monologues and addresses meant for everyone.

But in time, if time is with me, I’ll be glad

That so much of your private voice

Is caught in your lines, your quick amusement

And indignation, say, at the newest example

Of swagger our country is prone to.

Then I’ll be moved by how willing you were

To recast the failings of your country

As magnified versions of your own failings,

Your own pretensions, own betrayals,

How ready you were to slander yourself

In order to make your speaker a participant

In his country’s shame, not a looker-on.

When I think of what I know about America,

I think of kissing my best friend’s wife

in the parking lot of the zoo one afternoon,

just over the wall from the lion’s cage.

Now I worry about keeping them separate,

The facts, on one hand, and, on the other,

The fictions you made of them, but in time

I hope to be guided by your assurance,

In your late lines as well as late conversations,

That experience is often too profuse

And too luxuriant to be divided neatly

Into separate genres, separate files:

Sometimes I prefer not to untangle it.

I prefer it to remain disorganized,

because it is richer that way

like a certain shrubbery I pass each day on Reba Street.

Tony, I don’t know if the knots and tangles

In the strands that your friends are weaving

Mean we’re succeeding at making your story and ours

Parts of a single story. But if we’re failing,

They may show at least how we’re trying

To reach out to you as you pass us,

To do our best not to say good-bye.