A close friend died early this morning. This is for him and for those of us who loved him:
ELEGY: FOR WAYNE KRUGER, 1962-2011
Bombs fell in Baghdad that night, and all eyes were on the small screen
above the bar in a tavern that was demolished by mistake years later,
and what should have been a giddy chance to say goodbye and good luck
as you ventured west to the Rockies and a new start
became a solemn ceremony laced with uncertainty.
That war lasted just weeks, but never really ended, flaring
back up a dozen years later and still smoldering as the bombs
began to fall on Tripoli, hours before Bill called to tell us you were gone,
around the time that you left us. These things happen in threes is what they say, as if the dead
demand company in their travels, so when Annie heard about her Aunt Rae,
who died at ninety-seven a day before you were to go, it seemed to confirm
what we’ve known since Bill called with the news of your tumors:
It was when and not if, not maybe, and even the smallest bits of good news
provided in e-mail by your wife to the world were no match for the inevitable.
It all happened too quickly – a cliché, I know, but it did and I don’t give a damn
about the cliché right now because it all went down too quickly for any of us to comprehend.
And yes, too far away too to understand or say goodbye,
though distance is just physical and a piece of me feels
as if you’re still around the corner, as if we could meet at the Hub
and drink pitchers before driving to New Brunswick to throw
rice at the movie screen as Brad and Janet get married and drive off
into the sordid world of Dr. Frank-N-Furter.
One night, we stopped for drinks in the bar next door, the Stagecoach,,
Where the band played twisted, fevered jazz, the four of us the only white kids in the place
aside from a vibes player leading the musical assault.
We drank and left and laughed then shouted “asshole” at Brad on the screen
as sweet transvestites danced on the Arts Cinema stage.
On another night, you climbed the hill to the rail tracks
above the parking lot behind the theater –
I don’t remember who climbed with you but I do remember
the train whistle and someone yelling your name and the terror
that gripped my gut until you emerged from the darkness with a drunken laugh.
We were young, of course, and stupid and never thought of the consequences,
and I guess we were lucky to have gotten through all of that and, yes, to make a life,
which is all that we can ask of ourselves, to make a life and live it and be happy.
And I think of the tracer fire on the television that night
and the bomber planes over Libya tonight and question whether
anything has changed, whether it can, and know that so much has,
that you have left us, like Tommy and Glenn did before, too soon way too soon,
and that none of these words can do justice to your memory,
or the place you held in all of our hearts and souls.
- Send me an e-mail.
- Read poetry at The Subterranean.
- Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
- Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.
Hank Kalet 