Clifton Gachagua

On the day I set out on the climb, grief saddled in my back like a bag of marbles, my breath like clouds hanging on the low peaks of a mountain, on the day I set out leaving nothing behind, nothing on the bed, no version of myself, just my voice through the night, the voice I use to ward off nightmares. (My voice is a still life in itself, a shroud green and ultramarine deep blue, a bowl of apples and tangerines on a table.) On the day I set out, the mountain is high in front of me, the unreliable god of mist and fog. I have no voice to say how high my fingers must lift as if on a lover's upper lip, to take in the breath of how high my mountain is—white teeth behind a snow cap, numberless springs, cold like the enzymes in spit— a version of me is still asleep: the moving of a limb in sleep. Everything becomes lucid.

To the young and able man who lets his death come in with veils in his face that say you can come in and claim a place among us. To the young man who closes his eyes to the parting of clouds and lets what is beyond come in. To the young man whose body is still warm, that weightless being with halos, whose footsteps we will never fill. To the endless clock machine in the god body of the young man who closes his eyes as the light sweeps him to eternity. To the blessed beating of his heart when we listen to our closed palms. To the complex latticework of smiles in his photographs every two seconds you pick him up and back. God body love. Good-bye. To the young man whose laughter is now a memorial among us, as we sit under tents, listen to our mothers and sisters cry, shed our own not-so-private god tears love, shelter under the night that claimed him. To him and beyond and the endless love through which God privately loves him.

I like to think of your silence as the love letters you will not write me, as two sax solos from two ages across a stage, learning the languages of kissing with your eyes closed. I like to think of you as a god to whom I no longer pray, as a god I aspire to. I like the opening of your joined palms, which is like an urn where my ashes find a home. The music of your lashes; the silent way your body wears out mine. Mostly, I like to think of you at night when a black screen of shining dust shines from your mines to the edge of my skin, where you are a lamp of flutters. I remember the spectral lashes–marigold, tamarind, secret thing between your thighs, of closed kissing eyes. At night, the possibility of you is a heavy sculpture of heavy bronze at the side of my bed, a god. And I pray you into life. Into flesh.