It’s one of those days since he died when

I see people in the crowd who look like friends  
from two thousand miles away.  
                                    There’s a profile like Judy’s 
with the same austere short hair and deep-set eyes. 
I catch myself tearing up. 
                                    Look, the neighbor boy Ian 
stands by the fountain, no matter he’s now grown 
and works in Hollywood. 
                                    The Mexican polka band 
has no tuba but a plugged-in keyboard oom-pahs- 
oom-pahs. When the singer 
                                    turns he is my poetry prof 
who learned remote viewing at the Monroe Institute 
and still plays chess. 
                                    No one looks like my Tom. 
A forgotten librarian salsas by double time 
in this audience of dancers. 
                                    Floating crowd faces multiply                        
inside my mind like wet petals—apparitions 
of long-term grief. 
                                    It’s one of those days.  
You, Reader, pass by and look familiar even though 
we do not touch. 
                                    We have never even met.

Sitting deeply in grief,  
in deep grief and mourning  
morning and night.

The knights nowhere  
to be seen. Sight  
is a witness, complicit. 

From minarets and church pits,  
we illicit faith. The eve  
of Christ’s birth 

almost here. Hear the Earth  
as it receives the body’s  
soft and exposed tissues, the heart 

hard as a rock, the rock no longer 
figurative. We lost even  
the figures of our children. The outline 

of a body, jagged front line,  
bulldozed memory. Our eyes open  
to the mouth of a weapon. 

Someone, somewhere, is playing  
the violin in the background  
of violence.

Before all of this, we didn’t think    
too often of heaven. We wanted to fly  
through clouds, not above them. 

We’d lift gin from your mother’s cabinet  
and walk the hallways of Robert Asp Middle  
taking swigs in plain sight from a 20 oz  
Pepsi Clear, your gap tooth flashing  
at teachers we passed, your hands forgetting  
to pass the bottle, screwing and unscrewing  
the cap. After that I moved. We lost track.  
The news was six months old by the time  
I heard. When they don’t say what happened  
you know what happened. We used to catch  
rides from highschoolers out to the Red to jump  
the bridge. Water thick with clay. Red with clay.  
We kept close watch for underwater logs.  
Smoked Menthols. A 40-foot drop into swirls  
of currents. One time you stayed under  
and kicked downstream to trick me. Nervous,  
I stared at the surface for signs. No signs.  
I stumbled down the bank to dive in.  
The moment you were certain you had me  
the valley cracked with your laughter.

I think Cliff Swallow sounds like the name
of a beige-clad mortgage broker who hangs
out at the bar and doesn’t talk politics, but
it’s a bird I’m reading about to keep my mind
from diving fast into the abyss. If someone asked
what changed me first, I’d say love. Secondly,
I’d say death. Does the order matter? When I took
to birds I thought I’d be destroyed by staring
at flying, twittering blurs, but what destroys me
is what always destroys me. A friend once said,
every elegy is a love poem and every love poem
is an elegy. But there must be a difference. Trying
once to identify swallows darting in and out
of the shadows above the creek water slick with
reflections of willows and white alders above us,
I asked a friend,  What kind of swallows are those?
He squinted, and we all watched, the sky’s mirror
rippling in the shallow creek bed, the wet rocks
emerging like islands we might retire to when we
shrink into nothing.  Fast ones, he said, turning,
and shrugged. So much for the naming. Instead
a pointing to the flitting minutes so they lasted,
until they didn’t. Then all of us leaned over
the railing and stared at the quickly thinning light
and all that the light contained, all of us calmly
unable to distinguish, to classify, but we could
show each other the whole view, practically
holding each other by the collar so no one
drowned, as we watched every last fast
flyer swoop, yes, we praised what lives and what
disappears, we made use of the end of the light.