Timothy Murphy

For Stuart Longtin Heavy and gray now, dressed in deacon’s robes— I see you in your Speedo at Floyd Lake, its nylon clinging to those golden globes you exercised for Moorhead football’s sake. We hiked the Black Trail to Itasca Park, but now I see a deacon hard at work explicating the Gospel of St. Mark, our high school quarterback become a clerk— in the high sense. A boy with such good looks, you could have run to Hollywood and whored but turned to mastery of sacred books and the manly mimesis of our Lord. Lifesaver, that was your job at Wilderness, teaching tenderfoot farm boys how to swim. Soulsaver, I would call you now and bless any man who preaches Saint Mark to Tim. We take our coffee outside for the view, patrol the walk-about with twelve-foot mesh where drunks can smoke. What has become of Stu? The Word. Not on the page but in the flesh.

Cirrus dispersed. As a black night grew colder, clearer, I spied the binary in the handle of the Big Dipper dangling above my shoulder, a pinprick twinkling by a blinding candle. Absent the moon, its boreal corona, I watched the stars rise east of Ellendale, Guelph and Ludden, then wheel above Verona and sleeping friends who farm near Englevale. A thousand miles of road: I’d shunned the pavement which bears the burdens I no longer ferry, the cargo of material enslavement. Six eagles hunted small game on the prairie. An Arab prince’s fortunes once were measured by blooded foals, by sons his wives could dandle, by tributary quatrains to be treasured and his eyesight: a pinprick by a candle.

Touch and go. Our Cessna bumped the sand, thumped its tundra tires, lifted as if on wires, banked over ice and rocked its wings to land. We pitched our camp hard by the Hubbard’s face, some sixty fathoms tall, a seven-mile-long wall seven leagues from Yakutat, our base.

Cleanse me of my iniquity and wash away my sins.

The night you died, I dreamed you came to camp to hear confession from an Eagle Scout tortured by forty years of sin and doubt. You whispered vespers by a hissing lamp. Handlers, allowing you to hike with me, followed us to the Bad Axe waterfront down a firebreak this camper used to hunt. Through all I said you suffered silently. I blamed the authors of my unbelief: St. Paul, who would have deemed my love obscene, the Jesuit who raped me as a teen, the altar boy when I was six, the grief of a child chucked from Eden, left for dead by Peter’s Church and all the choirs above. In a thick Polish accent choked with love,