Silence equivalent to freedom. Ah, glory.
I learned yesterday that my dearest friends are to be returned to Seattle and to me. In joy then I let go of the bit I wrote when first they left. Welcome again, and gods speed, dearest necessary ones!
a valediction: of the christians
ten years a prelude to your parting,
baby-laden into the west,
out of the autumn once welcoming,
out of the torrents, the damp
that grew moss on our mustaches,
to sever the north from the northwest,
to brave again highway to almost home
almost I mourn, almost,
this dissection, allotment of dream
parceled to each now tighter tribe,
increasing each though in small walls,
small circles into longshot leaps,
city to city and decade to when?
out of the autumn once welcoming
to us, young vagabonds and lovers
and lovers-to-be, our touch then
so tentative each to each, and needed,
and believed: that if not free
or comforted we could be warmed
at least by wine by words by our
proximity, pragmatic on monday till
ecstatic by friday—oh,
to love was to survive was to
afford and nothing more? belie this,
spicy wine and grinning tryst,
leaps laughing over fences into cemetery
(how boldly we told death to fuck off then),
to live off meager muffins, cisco sips,
and pantomiming innocence adrift
in frozen metropole forced into home,
this drenchèd dismal grey roof dawn to gloam,
under whose frown we feared to be free,
still were freed till unafraid we stayed
we stayed and owned it all,
needle and beacon in our threadbare pocket
or elsewise-empty purse—sound citizens
we, glad sodden sousèd company—
and what’ve we conjured for legacy?
into the west toward the first city I ever aspired to, where we rehearsed (unknowing then) our emigration, read ‘candy’ between north beach and Chinatown while waiting for a cablecar (my first & last trip thereupon), where my future heather met raccoon by the beach—“silly raccoon”—and so won my love months before I knew it—
but not before the wind machine speedhelmed had delivered five pilgrims to the hawks’ great american aerie and alley and heaven thereafter—
not before you michael had schemed to desert, to slough off your uniform and go underground in berkeley, itself in hiding two decades or more—
and not before you’d grown there summer by summer, michael my bestman—
will so your wonderful rowan grow? and what luck to show such memory to your heatherlover own, at first within that selfsame summerboy home—
so much she’ll know so well,
and boy, and all . . .
lord all the love I’ve stolen from
you three (yes even you littleone,
a mere but mighty year into
a blazing bounty of centuries)—
lord how long you’ve sustained me,
raised me, made me believe
that belief is real,
is synchronized when love wills,
is twin and tangible when bound for the
(in damn-near unison) next of us:
our buggins and monkeyshines, mete to meet
the future’s greatest griefs and shatter them
to timid atoms! yes! but each to each,
and inbetween, the drift, whate’er it is
’tween cities (christ if I know anymore)—
yet may the magicks intercede
to hold these babies hopeful to
their origins their granted majesties,
that all these wanderings ahead of them
be foreordained (if but in blessèd
sentimental hindsight, yes,
when we are great with grey and care,
immobile save for wheelchair)—
lord all the love no lord
nor counterlord could contradict
betwixt us fated blessèd friends
no distance no remiss no parting
even so, but fastened forward
love to love,
inevitable as a drunken autumn
