Dear David,

When I write to you now I write
to one who has left the here for
the beyond. That’s the future, as you know
better than anyone. In the past, that rainbow
zigged across your face, your eyebrows absent
and so your eyes in their sockets went
unsheltered, direct and uncanny. I can remember
myself most clearly when I remember
how unnerving, how the gaze from behind the paint

loosened the strength of what I thought I knew.
All collapsed now, total blam blam.
Each new face effacing the last, a kind
of courage, I think now, an offering and
a refusal at the same time. And why would you
regret any of it? The trick was to give it away,
but not all of it, the unspent light drawing us
to you, to what you sang, with a gravitational pull.
Whatever that secret was, it keeps telling itself.

                                                             ^{for David Bowie}