For the Suburban Dead
       

How can I mourn them? My books should
lift up from their shelves and become doves—
or should I tear down the walls themselves

to dead eye level? Having passed through
the convoluted plumbing of the long
pneumatic tube that swallows all

beginnings into one glass after-
noon, I turn the lock to my apartment
no less stung, no less befuddled

than a tourist exiting the subway
uptown when the map had let him
run a sure, confirming finger

to the south. Now there are palm
trees in the city where I cross
against the lights, dodging traffic

from another kind of life: rented
bikes, electric scooters, touring
diesel-powered trolleys shuttling sun-

burnt souls back from the waters
upon waters of the broad Pacific coast.
Always aboveground, always going

east of freeways, west of mountains,
I shield my eyes from the white sky
and slide old beads across the mind's dark

abacus: eleven years, five states,
as many breakups, six apartments,
and one season in a vacant summer

home. In the layering of days between
my curtains and their last New York
borough window, I have learned to hold

the loneliness of cities in my teeth
like cigar smoke. I cross the street
and cast the shadow of a matador

lifting his cape against the wind's
untethered ghost. Each year, another
far-flung friend falls in a hole

cut like a tunnel to the overcrowded
underworld, only to be covered up
by clodded soil. I would lay myself

down like a flower on each headstone
if I could, but I have lost the plot
numbers, and, anyway, my face

has so much changed that I would
startle like a ghoul. How could it be
otherwise? In the imperceptible

arrival of each instant as it passes
through the permeable membrane
of the last, I am so busy being

grafted to the greenness, for example,
of just-mown grass, that I forget
the folding over of my skin—

collapsing in slow motion, bending
out while creasing in—thus seeming
always to myself both old and young.

I'm neither one. I cast my glance
some sleepless early mornings
to the east. In those vast hours

of evaporating dark, I can become
a stillness in the spaces between
stars. But then a cold light burns

another night from the horizon.
I watch it die. There, in the smoky
cobalt distance, I can almost see

the staggered stock chart silhouette
of old midtown Manhattan, where
the Empire State Building spikes

the skyline like an insulin syringe.
The clouds above its hypodermic
spire flicker red. I turn my head.

Look: from the curb of every corner
on the island, and all precincts
crosshatched out beyond the river

borders of its grid, the needle
is as much a landmark as it is
a promise or a pledge: the last

vaccine for mortal loneliness.
Doctor, your bag is being carried
through the doorways you just left.

I was a patient once. Now I have traded
pallor for a tan. And yet my friends
lie blue-lipped in cold basements,

scratching at the other side of rest
with startled eyes and children's hands.
Father, Mother, you know that

I have nothing to confess. How,
then, can I hope to be forgiven?
Scabs. Burnt spoons. Gnawed leather

belts. Hospital tubes. Hospital
gowns. Hospital beds. Doctor,
turn back. One of us lives.

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Copyright © 2021 Malachi Black All rights reserved
from Bennington Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission