The Sunday Poem: So I Remember

It seems that mortality is around me everywhere these days. Relatives left and right are failing, and a few days ago, my sister-in-law’s mother passed away. I have many poems about death and dying, because I have had a lot of people die in my life — most specifically, a lot of peers. Over time, it happens to everyone, of course, but I had three or four deaths like this happen before graduating high school.

Over time, of course, our brains are cruel things: they blur details, they preserve memories of memories, and we lose people twice over: first the loss of the person themselves, and then the loss of the real memory. You could even count that third moment, that instant when the person’s death makes of them something other than what they were: a giant stumbling rock of grief or dismay or shock or horror or even fear, obscuring the person they really were behind our emotional reaction.

This is a poem about memory. Specifically, it is about remembering Ed Schroeder, who was a friend in college — not a close one, but a friend nonetheless. He was a theater geek, specializing in lighting, and he died electrocuted while working on his senior obligation play. Kristen and I were gone from college by then, and we got the typical phone call.

So I Remember

Late phone call, accompanied
by that shiver prefiguring a fear.
Another death, we are told,
the voice clinical, open
like an arclight on a face
erasing all its contours.

I persist in seeing shadows, ink
delineating the stare I’ll see
tonight, in every headline snap,
a string cut puppet corpse, or crumbled wall
corpse, or wrinkled empty bag, or fallen tree
or just surprised, staring staring at

Tomorrow I’ll begin the necessary
process of erasure, in three
days his eyes will shut, in four more
he’ll be gone, smile
gone, stubble gone, loping
walk, and whimsy and will

but now
he squeezes shaking ribs grinning
unshaven, gangled and unfamiliar
he is not what he was and the shock
is forcing my hands together
so tightly I feel bones
and bones crumbling