Finality
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for Don The lights along the Minnesota River are golden nails fastening shut the horizon. The bus floats home, West across the plains, over this dark thread of road, past snow covered fields reflecting the moon's wet light, until we can no longer tell what is land or water or sky and we cannot tell which our brother rests in now. As we cross the final bridge into Saint Paul everything to the east darkens and the whole country closes around the heart of the Midwest, around its churches and its silos, its pilgrims journeying before death to kneel and kiss its winding fingers, to kiss its noble silence spreading between the Mississippi and the Rust Belt like a woolen and moth-torn quilt, a fresh coat of snow, a eulogy always, almost, spoken. Death, though it is final, is also hesitant and unsure. It is the persistent silence which follows that convinces us this boy was the one, this land too, these factories and these barges sunning themselves in the grey light as if they might dip beneath the water and re-emerge glistening and alive; these docks and these cranes, these warehouses angling into the shadows, preserved in a death-like geometry, though tenuous, as if ,if we clap and summon the lord, if we stomp our feet until we cannot smell what keeps the body here, until the body shakes, then might these songs wake him, might these factories turn and light like a bulb screwed in, might we be sentence like- not final, but running on forever through the grammar of mourning, the grammar of laughter when laughter is all that is left, until all that is left is his skin, and his bones, and we who buried him are only stories or ash on our grandchildren's mantels, and his name spray painted on the Oak Park wall is painted over or chips off and washes into the dirt, and his bones too become earth, and the bullet in his leg is all that remains, and rests, a small black seed opening in his coffin.
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Credits
- Writers
- Michael Lee