Elegy

Run away with me, keep going till 

we finally loosen our fierce grip on real.

Tell me, explain this life-wreck.

Answer me, are we here or have we strayed?

I swear this, promise it, some days all I want is

cigarette smoke all around, flinty glances drifting 

through the haze, smoldering love sparking burning 

through veins and the sweet basic release of skin on skin on skin.

Other days I can’t think about anything but young summer 

evenings at the creek and finding snakes and climbing escaping

into trees and crying into sudsy sinks - slimy dishes and blame for all the world's ills,

and more dishes - and running running running through the corn fields and 

tag-you're-it and sprinting heaving lurching fleeing through 

that sudden july thunderstorm pitching sadness anger bitterness into the wind 

and arms legs face into the hail.

This is for the incessant dragging riptide of my adolescent years. 

This is for the house I might have loved and the

first time I snuck out of it. This is for the 

city I wished to call home and the 

brother I grieved for while he lived. This is for the 

boy I loved then and even now and the 

sound of his voice over the telephone. This is for the 

coffee-shop on the corner of that north virginia town and the 

raspberry chai that flavored a lonely year away and the 

art studio that saved me. This is for 

you and your goddamn gorgeous mind.

And when I think that someday I might look at a little girl with a 

familiar ski-jump nose and bright old-soul eyes and know that she might

grow into someone who could write her own elegy of a young life with

the same worries and joys and losses and longings,

a knot of contradictions pierced by bright and dark strings strung 

permanently through other people’s hearts,

well it sometimes

makes me weary 

and it sometimes

gives me hope.

I must remember to tell her to travel light as often as possible.

poem - January 2012