no elegies

Sheila Black

Kind of like the whoosh of the Coney Island roller coaster or

the time I went to the Continental Divide and I didn’t believe

the old man at the gas station in the watchman plaid 

who told me, “Your eyes will change.”  But the plains leaping 

like an animal untwisted something in me that made me wonder

who I might have been had I not always been twisted.  Made

me think of you in Al’s Canal Street loft, with your high-arched

bare feet, and how bone-sad it made me feel when you let your mom

talk you into a nose job.  I know—the surgery didn’t change a thing,

but it seemed to mark the moment when the excitement of being

flattened by a big bad world shaded into a will to be flattened,

a kind of obdurate defeat like when a woman finds herself

lying under someone and communicates her resistance by simply

refusing to move.  I remember so much—your delicate flower hands

and dying our hair in Al’s narrow black bathroom and how carmine 

that carmine seemed when it was on top of our heads.  The time

you plucked your eyebrows so you could look forever surprised 

as if “in love with life.”  I hate the graph-pattern one can trace in

an elegy, that familiar two-step aria of love lost or addiction.

I want to give you something fiercer, more precise, what I miss

about that old world, which was just as cruel as this new one:

the material weight and slowness—our razors, our blunt scissors,

the fact that we never had access to a phone.  Remember when we

tried to make a soup out of the last of the peanut butter and a cup

of hot water?  Was this only youth—that we could endure the apocalyptic 

nature of our everyday?  I remember you said the subways were our 

cathedrals—the shivering walls of names of those who gave themselves 

other names, letters, sums, incantations, in order to mark what they

had suffered.  I don’t think most ODs even make it in the paper.  Waking now

again in the whiteness of death, what do you see—a girl is a thing trembling

with what the world will put inside her and take from her, put inside

her and take from her.