wishing you were live-n-lucid-A

for danny correa, in another (imagined) late-night email to him (lacking capitalization, as he refused it)

i don’t think i’ve ever written down [and don’t yet now, i’m typing]

the story i’ve been telling myself these near 25 years

of the voicemails and the crying [almost on cue, this instant, at the thought]

[took a break, now i continue – excess snot afflicts me]

how my then-wife (you, our wedding’s almost-only witness),

on that morning, night, and the next days,

tried to reach you on your primitive cell phone

and just left messages

praying for your safety and asking for you to call us

to tell us, “i’m okay”

then, on september 16, the early band of brothers episode “carentan” first aired:

after normandy, easy company returns to their british training base

and one of the men, malarkey, goes to the house of the local laundress,

who’d been doing the wash of the paratroopers, to pick up his fatigues

and the ma’am starts asking after his comrades, who’d not picked up their uniforms,

cataloguing for him all his mates who’d died on d-day,

before fading then to black

since that moment to this day,

i’ve thought of all the unanswered voicemails

residing on some verizon server or tape deck,

the dozens i’m sure for you,

multiplied by (those early cell phone days) the hundreds:

just so many (overwhelming) unclaimed outfits

[conceptualizing this poem, reclining nearly sleeping,

i twilight dreamt an image of myself being hugged by a man

to comfort me in my crying

and recognized it to be you (maybe now,

grown older, as you should’ve)

realizing maybe

you’re the last man with whom i did any hugging – 

it was then to comfort you that horrible night

the police came and told you (the horrific

and still can’t-possibly-be-real news) she was dead

(just a few months after

i’d moved you both in

to the apartment converted from doctor’s offices)

and in the weeks after, again and again

(just two years before you joined her)]

Diversion to Harrisburg

and here fly low

though still above some darkened clouds

outside (the blue-glow cabin,

two win-dows beside me)

as each we pass,

beneath ’s a blotter on this nighttime landscape

obscuring each golf course and ballfield

and the epic All that’s in between,

(and their upturned gazes

enduring, black among the stars)

a temporary loss of all the life

and built-reality below

you, numbering near 100 million,

first generation who has forgotten

(never having known)

while the rest of us

live with traumas we no longer acknowledge

(as I see we now do too with COVID)

as we fly west to east

but then loop around past Pittsburgh

a holding pattern unannounced

and unexplained

even when informed

severe weather ’s upon central PA

and we shan’t continue to Newark

(instead, get fuel in Harrisburg)

there is anxiety in

even the not-normally nervous

when the thought occurs

of the field in which

we might fall

unknown companions that surround me,

as their predecessors were,

unaware – that sunstruck morning –

as my generation,

never will be again

Encountered Wenzel’s Dedication

and, in their absences,

they’re all just found to be (eventually)

victims of my guiltless murder –

’cept for the overweight and abandoned –

and all ’s like a Poe story

as the railroad’s roar ’s become unceasing

and utensils bear the monogram of one’s memory

and they were dubbed, in their disappearance,

“The Sad Boy Mafia,” though composed of all genders

and one (or two) ’s recalled as a poet –

or artist and author of a beauty’s scrapbook –

and boxes of unsharpened pencils

have not erasers enough to absorb

the evidence of my wrongdoing

from when, just returned from a bid upstate

(Fonda, in black and white and

endless blowing, settling, and smothering dust)

and none ’re at all my fault

’stead just wrong-way drunken drivers

on interstates and lesser roads

or their own carelessness or

natural inebriation, only of youth and enthusiasm,

or disregarded enemies yet to come

thought all inspired

(seated at a kitchen’s ancient dinette set)

by close-up youth glimpsed

and undertaken research embraced

to understand a stranger’s dedication:

discovered origin as an echo