Bill B & I met & got sober in May ’89, hours spent
in musty church basements, smoke-filled VFW halls,
discussions, confessions over pots of black coffee.
I pounded for UPS, carting boxes from ten to six,
slept in a Days Inn by the airport. Someone dropped
a cigarette on a mattress, flames erupted at one AM
on a Monday. By dawn, the street was littered with
charred furniture, damp ash strewn for miles. Mike M
died that year in a car wreck, LJ guzzled a pint after
four months clean, cannon-balled off a rooftop dock.
Cops dragged Lanier for a week, never found his body.
My brother’s first son shouldered his way into the light.
Elizabeth R got married to Stephane B, white gowns,
pinstripe tuxes, bagpipes in the afternoon. My girlfriend
Rhonda screamed as tumors swung through her organs like
ravenous monkeys. I was bellowing into a microphone
when she passed, stomping a distortion pedal in a club
near Richmond. After her funeral, I packed my Strat,
stashed my amp, landed back in the classrooms, treading
those German philosophers, all that volition & angst.
Bill went off his meds, crashed in a Meck County unit:
ECT, a dozen pills in a paper cup, venting to therapists
until his throat was raw. One Sunday in the cafeteria,
we couldn’t keep the conversation propped. Silence rattled
the table like a foreshock, steel beams & concrete pads
dropping from the heights. The world fell apart for a while.
Today I thought of Bill, wondered if he was still alive.
I searched his name, the local obits. I felt that alien ship
hovering above the powerlines, the same way I did when
my younger sister died. Buddhists talk of impermanence,
how all content dissolves, what you’ve acquired, people
you love, consciousness itself. I know I cling too firmly
to my wife, as if we’re huddled on a pontoon in a swollen sea,
drifting toward a sudden edge. Some nights, the earth
is indeed flat, all currents heaving toward that bottomless
drop-off, the tumble of oblivion. Summer lingers, there’s
a song I’ve wanted to write since I was a kid, though I can’t
nail the chords. A wild melody swirls in my head, but I
can’t translate it, can’t access that ancient ship buzzing
in the clouds, ladders swinging all around me. Bill was
Catholic, I was agnostic. He prayed to his Christ, I listened
for the echo. But some days I long to believe those tales
of a golden afterlife, the purging of consternation, how we
might behold ourselves differently. Though perhaps we
ignored the angels during our terrestrial stay, we might
in that balmy glow, free of craving, heed their patient call.
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