– Wittgenstein

The word palisades I’ve loved
as long as I can remember—
 
beginning in palace, ending in aid,
a word with no downside.
 
There I played foosball,
tended horses, held a hose,
 
waited to grow able-bodied
like the boys. Say it wasn’t
 
where my friend was killed
at fourteen, would my peripheries
 
slope differently? In Manhattan,
I watched the seasons change
 
from a picture window
in a private library,
 
blessed by the protection
of early life’s omissions
 
when the families splintered
in my school and camp.
 
A skyline whose commuters saw
the mushroom cloud
 
on the GWB: I see
a forged memory.
 
*
 
I thought he must have died
that same year—the events
 
seemed so cosmically similar—
but we shared the world
 
for two years
and never spoke of it.
 
(More things we never spoke of
than things we did.)
 
And when he died,
I thought I’d seen the worst
 
of what a person could do
without meaning to.
 
*
 
Though sometime,
I must have fallen in love,
 
which took more room
than contemplating death,
 
and the slow, sad pleasure
of knowing it wouldn’t last
 
more beautiful, even,
than imagining it would.
 
All of nature, ready
to encourage it: children’s
 
silhouettes on paddleboards,
cicadas like prehistoric
 
hummingbirds, his fingers,
blistered, borrowed by the band.
 
Then autumn came:
the moment slipped between
 
the pages of death’s folio.
 
*
 
September again,
the prohibitory blooms
 
never forget surface, and I’m
uncertain of their tact.
 
I have kept the body
I lived in then,
 
can’t unhook the heft,
sirens like a pulse.
 
What promises to turn
into a kind of knowledge
 
continues past catastrophe
to become accustomed.
 
A beautiful day: severe clear
the pilots called it.
 
They had to call it something.
 
*
 
It never goes away,
pulled by several moons,
 
this telegraphic
conversation with the past
 
for which there exists
no adequate word,
 
only addendums
based on the day.
 
How it changes with each
retired artifact or face,
 
one exaggerated palimpsest,
if, after all, you must
 
call everything something.
And the later losses
 
inseparable from growth,
the ones that made me
 
limitless, his laughter
taking years to dry from my hair—
 
how, when I stole him back
from the years
 
through a broken fence
in memory,
 
neither of us could remember
what had made us glow
 
in the backseat—that ache
for what the years had kept
 
without my noticing,
their sleight of reasoning and hand.