Purity of Absence - Dave Margoshes

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the way it will

       and that’s fact,

       like rain falls down

      behind the times

       lies the land:

       keeping count

       refusing to lie

      Mother of mercy

       is this the end of Rico?

       Or does the pulse of desire

       that lifted him up keep racing

       through rain-slick streets

       like a speeding roadster,

       the fates on its tail in hot pursuit.

       Flaherty, you bastard,

       how easy it is for you to sneer

       at ambition extinguished,

       you whose only hopes revolve

       around slipping the cuffs

       on wrists of men with clearer sight,

       squeezing the juice from fingers

       that have moulded life in all

       its uncertainty and rigour,

       that have taken chances.

      He wound up in the gutter

       that he came from, just as you told

       the scribblers he would, just

       the way your divine plan dictated

       he should, but not because

       of any blur in his vision,

       any failing of his stout heart—

       the way you would have had it—

       but because of the fundamental

       flaw in his logic: sure, be big,

       the heavens are vast, stars beyond

       counting and man is puny unless

       he dares to stand on tiptoe

       and push his hand beyond his reach.

       Sure, Rico, be a big shot,

       the way the egg stains on your plate predict, but don’t you dare spit on the dance, or step on the toes of the dancer.

       for Charlie Niehuis

      Luis José Mongi, last man executed

       in the United States before the high court

       blew the whistle, gassed June 27, 1967,

       in Canon City, willed his corneas

       to two convicts, one at Buena Vista,

       the other to Rick Gardner, hospital orderly

       at Canon who’d done him kindnesses,

       a trustee who’d embezzled clinic funds,

       hands shaking with blindness closing in

       the way death sniffed around at Jose’s heels,

       “I won’t need them anymore,” he told

       the warden, Big Jim Patterson, who

       would pull the switch hissing in the gas,

       flip to the end. He’d beaten his

       common-law wife to death with his hands.

      Patterson took sick, wound up

       in hospital, and called for Gardner

       to be brought from the pen to look

       after him, doze in a hard-backed chair

       beside the bed through the night

       when ghosts of José and other spirits

       came back to dance their death jigs

       around him, the twitches of gas

       rushing through blood to claim it,

       José’s eye in Rick’s head gazing

       through the night at Patterson’s face

       without rancour, without compassion

       but with calm.

      Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland, wrote standing up.

      —Newspaper Item

      Not upright but upstanding,

       seeking not after flesh

       of young girls but spirit,

       his eyes on the heaven above

       them rather than within.

      This agony he feels,

       a love as yet unarticulated,

       forced into metaphor the way

       icing sugar takes on another life

       as the sure hand of the baker

       squeezes it through mortar and tube

       into hearts and bows, a daintiness

       beyond the ken of mere romance,

       this agony penetrating to the root

       of teeth, rotting the bone.

      Standing, yes, of course,

       and on tiptoes, the posture

       not only of poets but of poetry

       itself, standing, all the better to see

       the angle of sun

       arcing the horizon,

       all the closer

       to the length of our reach.

      Those hands

       have been very important

       for 24 victories this season

      and very important for seven innings of this game but now all Roger Clemens can do is fold them and watch.

      Thanks for the poetry, Joe,

       but the sentiment stinks.

       Carter doubles

       and Knight singles,

       sending him to third

       and redeeming himself

       for that error in the seventh—

      redemption, Joe, that’s the angle—

       and Carter scores when a wild pitch

       sends Gedman scrambling

       and Mookie hits this sputtering grounder

       down the first-base line,

       an easy out, except something—

       God, maybe, that’s what Knight says—

       makes Buckner daydream it out

       of his glove, spins around to watch it go

       with the helplessness of a bartender

       feeling the Scotch splash out

       of the glass and onto his best shirt—

       all this because we don’t quit,

       Mookie says in the postgame interview,

       we never say die,

       and some things are certain

       despite

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