Elegy for Robert L. Jones
There was a man so slow
his friends would make their dates
with him two hours earlier
than when he was required.
He spoke and thought, it seemed,
a tick or two behind
his friends, though what he said
was often beautiful.
He would arrive mumbling
apology, and those
who had awaited him
just smiled and shook their heads.
He was so slow the shuffle
of his shoes was like
a rain that's not a rain,
but first, stuttering drops.
He drank his liquor slowly,
too, and every night.
And every night, with each
slow pull on something cold
and cheap his voice dropped
a little more, though his
lucidity did not
diminish; it only stalled
before the morning light.
He wrote such poems of love
a man's respected for
by five or six who read
of love with cold regard.
He wrote them with his heart
in such a way that those
who wince to hear "the heart"
may barely nod, then sigh.
And he wrote them slowly.
One summer night of empty
bottles and much laughter,
some friends heard crashing waves
and dragged him off to swim
and lights of traffic and
the stars drew shadows over
him and glittered in the foam.
He swam too slowly, and got
dragged down and trapped by wave
after wave, until his friends
hauled him out of danger.
So it would be for years.
His painfully slow life
would get dragged down, and friends
would pull him to the lip
of some fresh misery.
He lost jobs, wives, money.
But he never lost his friends.
And even as his poems
no longer ooze from him,
and even as his heart-
that lovely aching thing
whose only issue were such
sentiments as cynics loathe -
has ceased to mosey on,
his friends stand astonished
to know he somehow slipped
ahead of all, into
that place where now he sits
and, smiling, waits for them.
Structure
64 lines · 1 stanza