Anti-Elegy

for TNH There are those who will never return to us as we knew them. Who if they return at all visit our sleep, or daydreams, or turn up in the features of total strangers. Or greet us face to face in the middle of some rush hour street, but from a great distance—and not in the full flush of bodies that once wanted nothing more from us than the laying of our hands upon them, as a healer lays hands upon the afflicted. There are those who by their absence are an affliction. I imagine that sometimes in your dark bed you still want to know why. Why the man you were just coming to love, who liked you close as he raced through the city at night, why he had to swerve suddenly. Why he had to end up on an operating table, dead. Why you of all people had to live, to repeat this unanswerable question. I could tell you about a woman good at ritual who, hardly believing in herself, was good at making vows the two of us could believe. Then one day I had to drive her to an early flight. The dawn was blinding. She was off to look for the soul no one else could provide. But was this the way to do it? She didn’t know. She wanted me to tell her. Tears down her face. And I kept driving. I can look back and say: on that day, that’s when I died. Since then, you and I have had a hard time believing anything could bring us back. And yet your brown body breathes new life into a cotton print from the fifties, and picks parsley from the garden for spaghetti carbonara, and cues up Mozart’s French horn solo, and fills up the kitchen with the aroma of sourdough, and gets my body to anticipate the taste of malt as the tops of American beer cans pop: good rituals all, because they waited out our every loss, patient with the slow coming back to our senses, undeterred by our neglect. As if they knew all along how much we would need them.