All Elegies

The past gathers itself quickly like debris;

time eddies around it, sort of stays put.

It takes fewer years than it took.

Dorothea is dead, just shy of one hundred

and one. Richard is old and only growing older,

though many of the greats of his great

generation are already decades dead.

Chris is dead, old then, when we passed

eventless afternoons unpacking boxes

in a tobacco shop. I was just out of college.

He was too old to be hauling out

trash, but too proud to let me.

Michael Jackson is dead. Even

Michael? Was he ever even alive?

Just yesterday a friend told me

his friend had hanged himself

at twenty-three, too young

not to hope for response or revenge.

I make myself sound old, but I’m not.

Of course, my mother is dead, gone

half as long as she lived, longer

than we were alive together. My father

is still alive, so I’m from somewhere.

Both the children of his second wife

have just had children, and I have two, too.

We diminish as we multiply.

But like Delmore says, I am I.

Memories can’t account for everything.

A dead bird by the playground

was shoveled away. Last night I stomped

out the life of a quarter-sized wasp.

I put the kids to bed. I did the dishes.

I threw out Brenda’s blackened roses.

Eventually, time passes, but it eddies,

like seeing someone again by surprise

after exchanging drawn-out goodbyes.