I’m going home from worldly London, I’m not sure I’ll come back
to see my living friends I love. Dead friends still speak to me, I
hear some of what they say. I take a cab from my hotel beside
the National Gallery to Heathrow, pass the Lyric Hammersmith
Theatre. I leave behind the living unabridged history of the
English language, I have a pocket full of Italian poppy seeds.
Under my hat, the Tibetan Book of the Dead allows a priest to
speak in the ear of the dead who still hear prayer. My passport,
not a poem, gets me through customs. British Air seats me,
gives me whiskey. A little after takeoff, I open Emily Fragos’s
manuscript, Saint Torch. Not by chance, Emily and I first met
among the cages at the American Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Animals.
Now I’m with Emily over the Atlantic,
that is, with her poems, a mysterious manuscript,
she’s a church sitting on a nest of eggs in my lap.
Looking down toward the unseeable ocean,
I’m inside a giant raptor, through the window
I see an airplane wing, the intelligence of clouds.
I can’t see what I know is down there.
Her songs make me confess to myself.
A flashing light tells me to tighten my seatbelt,
we’re 35,000 feet high, it’s 71 degrees below outside.
Emily, what of the night?
A Thistle Hotel room service menu appears
when I reach for a handkerchief,
I see a page from a translated libretto,
an Italian opera I don’t know.
(Vowels aren’t vague in libretti, whereas consonants
sing the vowels away.)
We must be flying over “mad Ireland.”
I just can’t take for granted I’m flying.
No question part of me lives in another age.
I try to clean my fine tooth comb of memory, a mantilla.
Where are the flamenco dancers of yesteryear?
I eat dark atavist chocolate, I’m full of remembering,
wanting English friends I’ve left in churchyards
to come back—some others I don’t know where.
In Torch light, I give thanks to omnipresent angels:
life, death, music, everything I cannot see,
what I know is there beneath the clouds. I write this
on the title page of Emily’s manuscript: Saint Torch.
I would not write on her gravestone.
It’s not a desecration to write rhymelessly.
Emily, are you going to be buried
with cats you love, their names and ashes,
as I will be, with most of my dogs’ ashes at my feet—
except those already under daylilies,
violets, and flowering trees.
Emily, you find the God’s honest truth.
Through the plane window I see snow, Nova Scotia,
Newfoundland, ocean again, then Boston Harbor—
smooth landing.
I pass through customs, declare nothing.
A trained police dog sniffs, mounts my luggage
filled with trousers that stink of good dogs.
* * *
It happens toward the end of the play
I swim with my dogs out to sea
past the Montauk Lighthouse—
my golden retrievers and blacks labs,
and precious mutts, exhausted, they paddle
back to me. They insist I just hold them.
Dogs are not aware of death, they believe in abandonment,
the everlasting. My dogs were and are devout,
but not their master.