CHELTENHAM ELEGY #702
His heart ached within a drowsy, numbed trance.
Cameras panned to him pacing the black-top, even
blacker at 3 am, which opens out on the expanse
of Mill Road, down the hill, past the school. Night deepened,
he was lonely enough to cry, heartsick for being
the only one of a scabrous tribe gutsy enough to say the name
which even then had rent Cheltenham, riddled
with bullets like a dog's corpse, assassins fleeing
the site of the hit, where the one kid, bound for fame,
did for himself the trick of ditching a tepid middle.
He levitates past himself, flies with bugs into crevices,
is the pilot of the few airplanes wafting by, Pegasus-like
for a mind intent on flight, meeting divinity, heaven's bliss
from a cockpit. Myers' schoolyard glistens like spikes.
She knew him then, at her end- saw how the spine
imposed truth on empty gesture, feeling on pretense,
vital life on the living death of their shared enterprise.
This, he could never know; yet without knowing how, why,
he strode past her emptied house that night, tense,
sweating in summer's stew, pallid in cold surprise.
The apostate flies around a small room, piles of books,
papers scattered, forests of drafts, faintly heard bird-song.
Verdurous plains suggest themselves; moss-softened nooks;
just out of time, to a mind o'er spelled by word-song.
He can only fly as he reads, over & over, the lays
already fastened to moss & flower, secured above
shallow stream. His friend waits, in stealth.
The early morning ride he caught then, from love
given, wasn't her- she had gone the way
there is no coming back- yet he slept himself back to health.