Mind in its purest play is like some bat
That beats about in caverns all alone,
Contriving by a kind of senseless wit
Not to conclude against a wall of stone.
— Richard Wilbur
Suicide. The phone call turns us idiot; you gasping
at new wind-walls of grief and I speechless; wooden
as doorjambs, dim in the abhorrent calm. Who
were we moments ago? What distance from love’s
gorgeous ruckus hovered even the notion of it?
Otter and otter, slicking love’s mudbank, thatching
our thoughts like rushes to smoothstone, cress — our tools
of play are what hold us, moor us belly-to-earth
or tugged, tumbling in a current of this and that.
Mind in its purest play is like some bat
As we set ourselves to small tasks (turning chives
so they fawn toward light, finally framing that postcard
from Kiev) and the scraping, the clanging of tactile life
loosens the solemn knot that’s clogged up your wonder —
“Is an hour taken, even a minute, to measure love?” Measure,
weigh in, or a series of simpler functions; throwing
breakers, shutting valves on a summer cottage reduced
to a box-shaped bunker for winter. Deliberately scripting
his heart’s notes from warm, layered fugue to a monotone
That beats about in caverns all alone,
forever emitting this chill but long since past listening.
Crimson valentines, white trim snipped from doilies, public
school sweethearts, you learned together, and early, the first
tinkerings of sharing one’s self, and that rarest of gifts:
the love that survives youth’s bat-blind, rigorous stretchings
to plant itself intact in the soil of maturity. Then long
absences. Laced liquor and cocaine hazing self-hate while he
shattered himself in Hull’s loneliest clubs. You saw
him through even that. Flagrant destruction didn’t stick,
Contriving by a kind of senseless wit
to guide each other an inch closer to health when
the black hours hit. I must owe him so much —
your exquisite listening, those echoing wells of endurance,
equally yours and his, where I now fill a cup tipped and
emptied so often. Amazed, in love, I laze
with our cat watching you sift through last things:
birthday card, a short note in a proud, thick,
felt-markered script — yes, weigh in, feel scales search
out their balance, a river’s poise is sorrow’s home —
Not to conclude against a wall of stone.