LITTLE ELEGY FOR AN OLD FRIEND

Well, there you have it,

                              everything fine and then the heart goes nuts.

Paddles and CPR, slaps and blows.

Jesus, how did it come to this,

                                               brain just vacuumed and good to go,

Everyone bending over you, not one you ever knew?

In the light they say you enter,

                                                     was Via Mantovana a part of it?

Or the ground-floor apartment on Via Duomo 6,

In Verona, 1959?

Or was it all Le Crete,

                                       Asciano and S. Giovanni d’Asso?

Sorrow, come pass me from hand to hand.

Time to reset eternity’s clock

To the far side of midnight.

Time to remember the unremembered, and the forgotten.

Time to release them, and give them up.

There is no balm, my man,

                                               not even in Gilead.