Elegy at the Crossroads

If I could call you back from the far shore of the darkness,
I wouldn’t.  I would let

the ocean have its say with you—you
who woke, each morning, cradling your shadow

like an instrument in its locked, black case—and had to let
our mad hands open it

to the immensities.  History
is a revving engine of scrap steel and fire

and you walked away from it, once; you wrapped it
around a jacaranda on the slick

Pacific Highway, then walked off
from the fury of its burning,

one more beautiful body built to be wreckage forever.
Tonight

in America, it is summer, and we are hungry
for the songs that might carry us

through our madness, the moon in us
dragging us down our fathoms

like the chunks of slag-iron in your steel-toed
boots, dragging you

down the drop-off in the river.  Mississippi
is a word that meant, once, wonder, and you waded in

with your mouth open and your hands
bare, the names

of your lovers on your shoulders, inked there
in spit and ash and the moon

of youth, the same moon
that had sung you

through your changes, the bitter moon
that is no one’s, and is always, the ruined moon

that must rise
as what it is.

Hush, now; there are hymns, still,
in these rivers.

And when the wind slips
through the kindling of these cities, when

the moon climbs in his cherry-leather
church shoes, rinsed clean

from his troubled plunge
in the darkness,

sing to us
of the hymns you found

in carnage.  Sing to us
in the language of the changed ones, you who slipped

into the river and became
it, its dark barges like the laden freight

of our own hearts, loaded to the gunwales
with their trouble; you who held

the dark harp of your own heart
and listened till they took it

from your own hands, your hands that grasped
your lovers like this country, hungry

for an afterlife
to rise for, your clear eyes

that were no one’s, once, and holy;
that were no one’s, and were

open, once,
and lived—

you
who were ruin, and were music,

and who knew, yes,
that the only way into the radiance

is down
into the terrible chaos

and waded in, waded in
with nothing, and trusted

it would lift you
with its riches,

and wouldn’t we also
come to love it, wouldn’t we also

trust in wonder, if every time but one
it always did.

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