Half-Light
by
Frank Bidart
That
crazy drunken night I
maneuvered
you out into a field outside of
Coachella—I’d
never see 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.
The
light I now envy
exists
only on this page.
The
New Yorker, November 10, 2014