Your Own Dark Case

Sprouting slowly up in browns, dull greens
and blues and purples, stricken by
a sudden superfluity of hopelessness,
your own dark case – some base experiment
your mind had thought to wield upon itself –

from which the whole of you now can’t retreat –
odd! – goosed, released into the atmosphere
by joy – wherein you had remembered
how he’d run across a loud Manhattan street
all goofy-limbed and toothy, roaring,

soaring awkwardly when he was probably eleven,
ten – a boy: and how this vast deliciousness
had proved he’d really lived. And how
the memory had severed, sieved from
its progenitor, long dead, into the head

of someone – you – who now remembered
for him – echoing, vicarious, alone. One brother
breathes, another died. Slippery, this silent ride:
to languish in this anguish, take its measure.
The greatest secret is the pleasure.




.