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Memorial
March 5, 2005    File under: Tapeworm

News of your passing — Of course you’ve heard
— but I hadn’t & no word of how, when, the
usual profanations, thank God, and I was too far

away to attempt the pilgrimage, so I met C
on his way out of town for lunch, a farewell already
planned and only the departure had changed:

we performed our valediction with a shot of whiskey:
it was 11 in the morning & we wanted to answer
with diminished minds diminishment, to write it within

with the radiance of all ferment & distillation:
that’s when this started, ferment of a letter started
but never finished, let sit, its sugars breaking down,

beneath a stack of poems on my desk, apologies
and thanks slow in forming to my tongue, my pen,
already too large to be wound into letters, a card,

to be enveloped, already coiling beyond any body’s
bladders, canals. Your voice so clear in mind:
you’ve created a form that can hold anything,

maybe everything: except this: so it grows,
shedding in my hope its flat for full, something
beyond digestion, toward a body: it’s February

again, which is why I remember this, four years
since, this sitting like a worm, gathering everything,
drawing energy to itself: now to release, express,

explicate, to draw the pall & allow what light
I’ve gathered, cadmium dye shocking me
from dark: there will be so secret no silent now ::

Posted by Jake Adam York at March 5, 2005 8:28 PM