Double Elegy

Whatever city or country road you two are on there are nettles, and the dark invisible elements cling to your skin though you do not cry and you do not scratch your arms at forty-five degree angles as the landing point of a swan in the Ohio, the Detroit River; at the Paradise Theatre you named the cellist with the fanatical fingers of the plumber, the exorcist, and though the gimmicky at wrist and kneecaps could lift the seance table, your voice was real in the gait and laughter of Uncle Henry, who could dance on either leg, wooden or real, to the sound of the troop train, megaphone, catching the fine pitch of a singer on the athletic fields of Virginia. At the Radisson Hotel, we once took a fine angel of the law to the convention center, and put her down as an egret in the subzero platform of a friend— this is Minneapolis, the movies are all of strangers, holding themselves in the delicacy of treading water, while they wait for the trumpet of the 20th Century Limited over the bluff or cranny. You two men like to confront. the craters of history and spillage, our natural infections of you innoculating blankets and fur, ethos of cadaver and sunflower. I hold the dogwood blossom, eat the pear, and watch the nettle swim up in the pools of the completed song of Leadbelly and Little Crow crooning the buffalo and horse to the changes and the bridge of a twelve-string guitar, the melody of “Irene”; this is really goodbye— I can see the precious stones of embolism and consumption on the platinum wires of the mouth: in the flowing rivers, in the public baths of Ohio and Michigan.