Gone is Gone

                               for Lucie Brock-Broido

 

            I was there at the edge of Never,

of Once Been, bearing the night’s hide

 

            stretched across the night sky,

awake with myself disappointing myself,

 

            armed, legged & torsoed in the bed,

my head occupied by enemy forces,

 

            mind not lost entire, but wandering

off the marked path ill-advisedly. This March

 

            Lucie upped and died, and the funny show

of her smoky-throated world began to fade. 

 

            I didn’t know how much of me was made

by her, but now I know that this spooky art

 

            in which we staple a thing

to our best sketch of a thing was done

 

            under her direction, and here I am

at 4 AM, scratching a green pen over a notebook

 

             bound in red leather in October.

It’s too warm for a fire. She’d hate that.

 

             And the cats appear here only as apparitions

I glimpse sleeping in a chair, then

 

             Wohin bist du entschwunden? I wise up,

know their likenesses are only inked

 

             on my shoulder’s skin, their chipped ash poured

in twin cinerary jars downstairs. Gone

 

             is gone, said the goose to the shrunken boy

in the mean-spirited Swedish children’s book

 

             I love. I shouldn’t be writing this

at this age or any other. She mothered

 

             a part of me that needed that, lit

a spirit-lantern to spin shapes inside

 

             my obituary head, even though—

I’m nearly certain now—she’s dead.