elegy for tyler jameson

(May 29, 1991 – August 7, 2010)

1

Where you went, are there blue lights

on the runway? Did angels in jumpsuits—

without wings or flowing hair—

shoot you into the air with a metaphysical

black jetpack to fly you,

a jetpack outfitted with existential engines

colored red to hit the sky.

The angels there smoke cigarettes

to make you feel comfortable.

Offering you an American Spirit,

a bearded one will smile.

They’ll say look,

you exist, existed, and even now—

live, elsewhere.

—Are you now walking a dark path

among the blue lights of death,

more confused than when you left

that yes, in fact, you’re still awake?

I hope you’re bewildered to live.

I hope it begins to make sense.

I hope that love strikes you in the eyes.

2

Have you left yet?

The ancients used to say the soul

had trouble leaving the body,

like it was tethered to the bone,

a horse to a hitching post.

Maybe they’re outfitting you with books

there in eternity, some reading for the journey—

but it’s all poetry now, where your body goes through walls.

For us, all this talk of philosophy becomes useless.

Here, we need something more elemental than words.

You can’t be weighted any longer.

Or perhaps, like a ghost

you linger, but having lived,

having loved

all you see is beauty—

the trees, growing,

(you were

never a piece

of an infinite machine).

Your love for the world conducts the memories forth—

now you see electricity in all its currents

in colors our eyes never saw.

You can see a music in them.

Finally, some theories—even Sartre’s—

make sense, make love.

An angel whispers your name

before you take (life in) flight—

“When you tire of earth’s glory again,

the blue-lit runway awaits you.”

to john berryman

You cut a fine figure

in my brain. Almost as bad

you were at college as me -

mostly of overwork, too much socializing,

and antipathy towards idiot-teachers.

Taught well, you bucked up.

Or wavered under your head

fucked-with by frailty,

sailing towards poetry like a compass

pointed north. But there was

mama's dominion & daddy's death

to deal with, and mostly you were

busy in love (not with your wife),

whiskey or white page-inking . . .

Somewhere off that

bridge you jumped -- I hope

there's hope.

riding route 31

I pull the hair out of my eyes
as I sit up in bed, the sheets full of sand,
emptying of me. The bus

comes later every day; I contemplate
not one but two prework smokes
but there's no time. My chest

is developing a hole anyway.
Yesterday, I shaved. The usual business
of turning into sandpaper has already begun,

a kind of madness. The hairs grow.
I cut them, the dark brown and red ones, and rinse the sink.
Sometimes the hole seems to be

growing into a kind of forever.
I watch the summer grass dying. I miss you.
And then bus comes, the scenery moves:

I imagine the touch of my lips to your ear
in lamplight, feeling the music of your mouth,
soothingly, -- and 22nd street rolls by.

the worst possible ordeal

"I have . . . a feeling that endowment is a very small part of achievement. I would rate it about fifteen or twenty percent. Then you have historical luck, personal luck, health, things like that, then you have hard work, sweat. And you have ambition. . . . I do feel strongly that among the greatest pieces of luck for high achievement is ordeal. . . . My idea is this: the artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him"

- John Berryman ['The Art of Poetry XVI' Paris Review, winter 1972]

cloudy with a chance

Oh dear!
On the screen the world breaks apart. I'm believing:
A hailstorm of meatballs, spaghetti, burgers, and sauce
falling out of the sky. It was a children's book once.
I read it, eleven years old, at school.
Smithville Elementary, a long brick low-to-the-ground
building that met itself at a 90 degree angle,
the library in the hinge, my granny at the desk,
with a hill sloping down to the playground
still made of steel and painted
six or eight primary colors.
(Red green blue
red yellow orange red
blue green white?)
We dug holes in the ground
pretending to be archaeologists.
We ran around hollering. Shot each other with toy guns.
Fell to the ground, quite dead. Counted to thirty,
resurrected to live again.

The book - I loved it. Now I cry, stupidly -
watching an outdoor film in Riverside Park -
for what I'll never have again - a second innocence -
& perhaps the beauty of what I have now . . .
a second's worth of windlovereality,
but is it anymore graspable? I'm believing:

sunburns are not all bad

Late summer eyes burn blue-lit
August skies from the dust,
I now sit in cool-skinned shades.
Red shoulders and redder
knees from sitting too long by the canal,
colored from water reflections
and from thinking about your paler
skin, skin unsunned, mostly
in classrooms, bookrooms, libraries
and busses. (It wouldn't take much
to be paler than this scorched
tomato shade.) I twist the cherry
from my cigarette in the yellow
grass, make sure it dies alongside:

no one appreciates an urban wildfire.
I slap my hands together
and glance up at the glaring sun.
It's feeling less like fall than Seattle
summer is wont to do, and I like that.

waking, i find you

Waking, I find you filling my day's song.
And full of rising winds, through my wild hair,
you toss me toward the light.

And perhaps one day, in wheat fields
you'll chase me,
or on sandaled desert planes
near Santa Fe,
or climbing the golden pine-scented hills
of northern Colorado.

We'll see, won't we? We will.
You, the best of my wild hairs.