Sought After
1.
The book ends.
In the beginning was the word pumped out by the human heart.
The irony of the poem as a form of question presented as a statement speaks to me.
The paradox of him and her and gender undercurrent in malediction, malefactor, maleficent.
The hole in your heart wider than the wind blows through me.
The tender, active, loving care of language as your life mission.
The heartfelt love you gave so deeply.
Good friend gone.
2.
The sober assessment begins with the fact that you died sober,
No small accomplishment but not in itself the place you sought.
Looking back, you had softened from the true believer
Hard sectarian judgments one vision one view only.
The disillusion of a revered older brother fallen
From he who channeled the muse in a mystical trance
To he who mused on himself often rambling uninspired.
The broken world when your admired father leaves his marriage
And later when your mother despairs and takes her life.
The sad realization in your time of loss
That some we find are good time friends only.
Your muse had left you not a few years ago
But by then you had an insightful incisive body of work
And for you there was no endless repetition.
Your body festering with painful boils, a life-long plague,
Suffered with a wince and a smile and a joke for so many years,
Never treated to a cure, eventually building to fatal sepsis.
Let me tell you of the special place you reached.
You were a good, moral person who always did the right thing and kept his word.
You had a wonderful long marriage, so rare, such a gift.
You cared deeply for everyone in your family, you held it together.
You listened with your heart open and gave your whole self to us.
Any of us could wish to be such a person.
3.
Your recurring dream you told to me, what was it?
Afterwards, I spoke of your fear of leaving with the journey incomplete.
You are in a car facing forwards hurtling backwards.
You have no brakes, no control.
You anticipate the crash and wake up heart pounding.
I imagine that night you died this was your dream again.
Some 42 years ago I was in such a place with you.
You were asleep in the passenger seat of your Opel.
I was driving all night through the snow across Ontario
Heading home to your brother in Detroit.
I drifted into a dream like the snow, the car drifted towards the ditch.
Startled, I hit the brakes hard and the car spun around
And we were hurtling backwards, no brakes, no control.
And magically we spun around again
And came to rest on the road facing forwards.
I can still feel my heart pounding
Waiting for the crash to come.
That woke you up. You took over driving.
That was your time, when the driving gets tough.
Now you are on the other side, a dream figure to me.
4.
Who knew at the last parting?
Your complexion good, your mood upbeat.
Such happiness between us to have some days
Conversing, catching up after the long hiatus
Filling in the events of a lifetime.
You getting special treatment for my car at your shop.
You enjoying the company of youth in my daughter.
You delighted that the world had beaten a path to your door.
You approving my business of helping the helpers.
It was all good but for the covered rotten flesh.
Wouldn’t that medical nuisance resolve itself?
As another dying man said,
“Man plans and God laughs.”
5.
“Into the same river no man steps twice”
Imagine us making night time covert trips to unsecured mimeograph machines
Stencils in hand, reams of paper purchased with literary magazine funds,
Some kind of underground publishers like a Vox Clamantis in Deserto,
Proudly distributing Free Poems Among Friends by the hundreds
To all male animal house students on the way to the morning mail.
How the many scoffed at our unmanly words, making the private public.
How a few were moved and inspired and joined with us.
How the war loomed horrible over everything in those days.
How much the place has changed, but I know I must show up again
In that same place with that same brash unashamed daring
And hand this poem to perfect strangers in the street,
My homage to he who is now among the ancestors.
6.
It is about class consciousness in the end.
We didn’t understand that at first. We thought it was about race
And for sure race and class are twined together.
Me coming from a street where the fathers were bus drivers
And bar tenders and traveling salesmen with figurines in the trunk.
You coming from Flint of the GM sit down strike and future Michael Moore fame,
Off to the Ivy League on a football scholarship.
Your brother the Motown fan radio show DJ driven to be famous
As his ticket out of town away from those wage slave roots.
They didn’t teach Marx at our college
And we didn’t know what we were missing.
We knew it was about race when the hillbilly line workers threw bricks
Over the fence at us partying with Black jazz musicians that summer.
But it was more complicated. We were the carefree college kids
Living it up with sex, drugs, music and idleness.
They were trapped in the underclass and resenting us.
Next summer was an eye opener for me.
Such a fire storm of rebellion against police brutality.
Our city occupied by the 101st Airborne arriving at our doorstep on the John C Lodge,
Patrolling with their M16’s, us popping our heads up to witness then ducking down.
What a time was that, but most of all
I was astonished when I saw those neighbors out with their Radio Flyer wagon,
Bringing home the groceries that first night.
What? Integrated looting! A class riot not a race riot.
This was an education not found in academia.
You becoming a White Panther busted
And working all those years in concrete forms.
Me becoming a Manhattan delivery driver and union activist
For 18 years like some Charles Olson cum Richard Henry Dana.
Both of us self-medicating the aches and pains with beer
Like we came home to the sea of alcohol of our undergraduate classmates.
But both of us stopped drinking. Both of us went on to new careers
Not physical work. Ours the parallel lives.
You parlayed your English degree into running a small town bookshop.
And I used my math and logic to make software for social workers.
At the end of the day we found a way
To make an honest living doing no harm.
And for you the last page could say:
“He was a stand up guy.”
7.
Waking in the middle of the night from a remembrance dream of you
Writing this down as if to return me to the dream moment,
Seeing again your youthful plump pink cherubic face.
It is a departure scene, wouldn’t you know,
After a group gathering together to visit for a few days.
It is nearing the end of the day, somewhere warm.
It is still daylight savings time.
We are the last to go from that house.
We are going our separate ways.
I am going back East into another time zone.
You leave a note for our host taped to the TV screen.
The note is numbered 1, 2, 3 like beginning, middle, end.
The words melt into the phosphor of the old tube.
I see the first and second sets flash and fade
And then the final part scrolls up the screen like movie credits.
I carry my luggage out to load my car
And I wake and lie there listening.
I hear your delighted voice reciting poetry,
Entranced by the musicality of the verse.
“Fra bank to bank, fra wood to wood I rin,”
And so began the sweet lover’s lament.
You were such a singer of the spoken word.
