To You Who Died

The regal whorls and whirls I see in your fantasia,

the purple and the crimson of your courage and your

heart – mercifully your agony metabolized into aphasia

which, when I attempt to think of you inert, I strive

to say endowed you to a mystical degree with meaning –

weaving purpose into your insentience – pursuing

what will make me want to love and grieve, achieve:

most of which I find I neither rabidly desire to despise

nor to believe. Oh, Steve. (I’ll call you Steve.) I'm drawn

to grand denial and hyperbole no less than you or anyone

you met before you last saw me. But who are you, gone

with the dawn? What goes on? Nothing goes on. It’s not

that my capacity for the Selective View of what’s become

of you is any less unbounded. I’ve a taste for the fantastically

unfounded. But the paradox of being human must bear

two perplexities, not one: the reflex to dig down to dig up

everything and howl it out like wolves, and the breathless

urgencies that dog us, stun us into clinging to the lie.

The only reasonable admonition left amounts to this:

plan never to know anything. Expect to die.

.