Remember the Easter eggs?
Remember running
and hunting them,
finding them,
remember the taste?
and your favorite color?
Remember finding them
under a leaf or
behind a tree
where they were
carefully hidden
lovingly hidden,
and you ran
oh you ran
and you laughed
oh how you laughed
Remember you had the bag?
or a basket?
There was always a bag
or basket,
at Christmas,
Halloween,
Easter,
and we were
always running
with our bag
and laughing
and our laughter
was the best
music of
our times.
I walked into the
room and James
was there and we were
both twitching,
same eye,
INTRAC it was called,
some name they made up,
we had t-shirts,
there was golf,
there were picnics,
there were banners,
James and I can be seen
in the pics,
you can’t see the twitch.
but the eyes do look blurry,
it started at the cheek
and went to the eye,
this twitch,
it showed up especially
after the speeches,
there was a team
there was a coach,
he didn’t have the ball,
we had the ball.
James twitched,
I twitched,
we worked,
we made it work.
One night at eleven
we were there,
the team,
the ball,
He came roaring
out of his office,
James and I looked up,
twitched,
Where is the list I gave you people?
Is this the best you can do?
I have people.
They want to know our level of confidence.
Is it really eighty percent
and how can we get to
eighty
five
?”
You can see him
in the picnic photo
with his thumbs up
AJ was whiter than I remembered, and his lips were taut.
I reached over to fix a lock of his hair,
then stopped.
Egad! I’d almost touched a corpse.
I sat beside him, smelling Bubby’s brisket and potato kugel,
thinking of her applesauce and lemon cake.
Then, suddenly,
I started to shake inside.
I should be ashamed,
only thinking of myself.
But AJ always liked food, the gathering of family, and close friends.
This was a time to make amends,
to bury the hatchet, along with the dead.
And as Bubby came from the kitchen with a platter of chicken liver and bow ties,
I swear
I thought I saw AJ smile.
Every once in a while,
I’d see you in the distance
while I was driving down the street.
I may have seen you
only eleven times in my life,
and I know a part of you
is essential in all of my living cells,
but as I said,
I’ve only seen you from afar.
Once, I saw you
outside my bedroom window
after the first snowfall
covered the land in a blanket of white.
That’s when I saw you
walking outside alone,
looking for your next meal.
I know you can leave
me with a sour taste,
but I know you are needed
in ATP, DNA, RNA,
and it aches me to see you suffer so.
I think I saw you with your children
as I sat out on the balcony
of a father’s house —
I watched you in the distance,
but I didn’t watch you alone.
After a while
someone said to me
that you looked peaceful,
but at another time
they would have shot
and killed you instead.
As I said,
I only see you from afar,
so I try to learn
of how you were created
from such large places,
at temperatures higher
than anything we could imagine.
I tried to learn,
because one day
I was told to go outside,
and that’s when I saw you
laying down among the trees,
never to walk away
from my home again.
I’ve always only
seen you from afar,
and suddenly,
as you lay there,
I could see your organs
shriveled and sunken in
after your skin
had pulled away
as you wasted away.
Suddenly
I could see traces
from your capillaries,
and I could trace
your rib cage,
outline your spine.
I know the heat that created you.
I know you’re highly flammable,
and I know that when you start to burn
you’re impossible to stop.
You fire bombed
in World War Two,
and the only way
they could stop you
was by dumping dry sand on you,
because you’d burn through the air,
and you’d even burn under water.
That’s why you’ve been used
in fireworks and in flares.
That’s why you’ve been used
for illumination and flashes
in photography.
So they call this
momento mori,
I thought,
when I grabbed my camera
to photograph you
in your final resting place.
Because
even though
I’ve seen you,
I’ve needed you, and
I’ve known the damage
you can do,
I needed to photograph you
right then and there.
I’m sorry.
I needed to
remember you this way.
