Mail Call: In Memoriam J. C.

                                         …and He keeps faith with those who
                                        sleep in the dust.

                                                     From Hebrew liturgy

I was scraping my clotted combat boots when it came,
your letter.  God!  Is it fifty years now gone?
Soldiers coughing, hawking dust-brown phlegm
out bivouac tent flaps, shouting filthy shouts—
your letter held in my fingertips, not to smear it
with desert dust, or the sweat, or the sharp quips—
not to smudge your voice traced on the page,
so clear in the first lines: 
                                    …really sorry—
it’s finished—no use trying—thanks—goodbye…
A gritty wind in my face; then fifty years.

​

Now old, I lower my eyes to a new message
that you—now you—your dust grown old—are gone,
your song stifled in dust, the choking dust;
and the sad guffaws of the barracks-boys—so harsh,
yet frail, more frail than mere tears—return
across my crowded life (my children grown,
and yours that are not mine somehow, unknown).

And you—unknown even before that letter—
gone even before your page spilled
your dark dust, your truth darker than tears—
now you, dead, your song in the long dust.

                                       

Decades, decades, building a life:  I have wed,
rejoiced, and wept, stood by the crib, have dreamed,
and I wonder, wonder:
                                Will He who gave us death
stand faithful over the dust stained with our sleep
to whirl us bright from the bone in a laughing wind?
Ah well, ‘til taken in that white day, my dear,
I wait, I listen,
                   wait in a world astray,
listen to the long sift of the long dust.