As you began You’ll end the year with me. We’ll hug each other while we can. Work or stray while we must. Nothing is, or will ever be, Mine, I suppose. No one can hold a heart, But what we hold in trust We do hold, even apart.
The Dump
He died, and I admired the crisp vehemence of a lifetime reduced to half a foot of shelf space. But others came to me saying, we too loved him, let us take you to the place of our love. So they showed me everything, everything– a cliff of notebooks with every draft and erasure of every poem he published or rejected, thatched already with webs of annotation. I went in further and saw a hill of matchcovers from every bar or restaurant he’d ever entered. Trucks backed up constantly, piled with papers, and awaited by archivists with shovels; forklifts bumped through trough and valley to adjust the spillage. Here odors of rubbery sweat intruded on the pervasive smell of stale paper, no doubt from the mound of his collected sneakers. I clambered up the highest pile and found myself looking across not history but the vistas of a steaming range of garbage reaching to the coast itself. Then I lost my footing! and was carried down on a soft avalanche of letters, paid bills, sexual polaroids, and notes refusing invitations, thanking fans, resisting scholars. In nightmare I slid, no ground to stop me,
until I woke at last where I had napped beside the precious half foot. Beyond that, nothing, nothing at all.
