To One Dead by Maxwell Bondenheim:
I walked upon a hill
And the wind, made solemnly drunk with your presence,
Reeled against me.
I stooped to question a flower,
And you floated between my fingers and the petals,
Tying them together.
I severed a leaf from its tree
And a water-drop in the green flagon
Cupped a hunted bit of your smile.
All things about me were steeped in your remembrance
And shivering as they tried to tell me of it.
and Half-Light by Frank Bidart
That crazy drunken night I
maneuvered you out into a field outside of
Coachella—I’d never seen a sky
so full of stars, as if the dirt of our lives
still were sprinkled with glistening
white shells from the ancient seabed
beneath us that receded long ago.
Parallel. We lay in parallel furrows.
—That suffocated, fearful
look on your face.
Jim, yesterday I heard your wife on the phone
tell me you died almost nine months ago.
Jim, now we cannot ever. Bitter
that we cannot ever have
the conversation that in
nature and alive we never had. Now not ever.
We have not spoken in years. I thought
perhaps at ninety or a hundred, two
broken-down old men, we wouldn't
give a damn, and find speech.
When I tell you that all the years we were
undergraduates I was madly in love with you
you say you
knew. I say I knew you
knew. You say
There was no place in nature we could meet.
You say this as if you need me to
admit something. No place
in nature, given our natures. Or is this
warning? I say what is happening now is
happening only because one of us is
dead. You laugh and say, Or both of us!
Our words
will be weirdly jolly.
That light I now envy
exists only on this page.
In both places the speakers are suspended against a natural backdrop that isn't really now and suffused with contemplation of someone who isn't really there. "There is no place in nature we could meet" fills the comparison in a pat way, but its casualness is a great contrast to the void between the speaker and their dead companion. Half-Light has some wonderful movement back and forth from the present to the past, at least, that's how I interpret "Jim, yesterday I heard your wife on the phone /
tell me you died almost nine months ago" coming just after a sequence of memory and just before another.
Ever have a piece of art/text surprise you by its similarity to another? See/read something and have the timing coincide with another book/object?
Ever have a piece of art/text surprise you by its similarity to another? See/read something and have the timing coincide with another book/object?
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