Elegy withHandgun, Soot, and Bird by Arian Katsimbras For Larry Levis Across the street, parking lot crowned with fence and church, I would watch you dance in an abandoned scow late mornings under larkspur and steeple, make home some unusable hymn, its sound strung behind you like white lanterns in autumn with bulbs missing. You would sit with the sidewalk after, buckle over its corner, sink bare feet in asphalt and reach out to pluck red from taillights like burnt starlings from night. You would fill your mouth with sand, with Lorca and herons that walk through screams of cemetery grass, and always with claws of crushed landscape that swam like ghosts or rain in our periphery. And those nights when the moon reached into itself, you argued that history is not linear, but moves in pops and bangs, flashes of light and violence, like hiccoughs or gunfire, that it drifts listlessly in an unlearned waltz the way the West’s clouds do, abstaining and neglectful. We had rinsed ourselves in language then, bathed in a wash of traffic light, all the smoke and manes of ash, baptized ourselves in the spaces in-between. Tonight your steps move in cumbersome sway, hands try to find shelves for those who throw songbirds down sewers, while I, now gray and some months, sit on the steps of some cobbled and unknown place and turn cedar leaf and bottle into blanket and symphony, roll history and cigarette together in that clash of violence and apology. theMeadow 91
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