Death happens and we all have to keep going. Remember writing? I don't. When my teacher died I remembered his collection of embroidered shirts, each thread a river to his his dance moves, each jerk of his arms a line break. I remembered the way he ran through town, faster, faster, though surely his heart was already on the way to failing, surely he was on his way to a new heart, his feet hurrying the pavement. Let's think about eyeballs or crazy shapes. About Dadaism. About Kenneth Koch. Let's think about Keats, whose manic highs and lows fascinated my teacher, who my teacher even looked like! Now that I've put an exclamation mark in my poem, this is a real elegy to my teacher, who I will never see again. This is a real elegy to the landscape of soft rolling hills that edge dramatically into limestone cliffs when they hit the river. This is a real elegy for a small rock painted with green swirls that somebody left on my desk. I couldn't see the edge of the cliff or the river or the rock. I could only see my teacher, at the front of the classroom gesticulating wildly as he quoted Hopkins, each quote an ecstasy, each movement of his arms a splash of sprung verse, and every time he pushed his glasses back up his nose bridge—a little goodbye. There, there are two people on a bridge, on a land bridge at the edge of a river, and one of them is stopping in the middle and turning around to take a last look at the trumpet vines blasting their blossoms in the late August fog, and at the hills, and at us.
