For Davey G. Johnson
You—fast as a shark,
who wanted it way,
way too loud—
you were incandescent,
a flame-kissed tear in a
Sierra Nevada wind
forty degrees Fahrenheit
and dropping. but you climbed
California State Route 49
in sun-soaked plastic,
an aluminum trellis,
to search and destroy
atop nine hundred ninety-eight
cubic centimeters
of raw whining power
as the sun cast its
final warmth of the day
upon the ghosts of cannibals.
you were not without scars
on your brain and your body:
you had felt grief like
a new limb, like the void of
an absent hand, whose movements
you could never quite grasp.
you, who had screamed through
sheets of drywall in San Pedro,
drowning lungs against
the salt-water spray,
you always knew what time it was,
stainless-steel Rolex a kaleidoscope’s curse.
on the day you turn from the current
casting your gaze at the North Fork below
where the ducks take flight
like silent seaplanes, green and brown
two in a row—hadn’t you once heard
that they mated for life? the last creatures
on Earth, you must have
told her this on the day you proposed,
in the Four Seasons, wearing Ferragamo slippers—
apologies, please, but a litany of memories
flood my bones, in your stead,
in lieu of your presence:
circling Lake Tahoe, my first
few desperate miles
across the divining lines.
watched like a voyeur as you held a lover
at four in the morning
silhouetted by the car’s headlights
before we dropped down to San Francisco
in the aching traffic. I had driven in from Playa Del Rey.
we flew model airplanes in your backyard.
tension in my jaw, I was staircase wit
in your Eichler ranch-style house,
I had never met the Sausage Creature,
hadn’t survived a year with The Goose,
and I had once believed
that my friends would last forever—
that the water
wouldn’t dissolve
your body
cell by cell
wispy and white like egg drop soup.
all rage ends aimed at the skies
for it knows not what echoes through its
negative space. from the cosmos
we expect no answers.
maybe the future is coming,
maybe it was written in your stars,
and when they find your body
we will sing
what we had sung all along.
