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You don’t have to tell me.
Not after the party that Edie attended
without Ty for the first time. Everybody
could see how lost she was
—as if the poles and the North Star and the Southern Cross
had been buried with him, like glittering jewels
in his casket. Out on the patio
she began a muted sobbing. When that dwindled away
I rubbed her shoulders, attempting to work
the immediacy of the sorrow away. The shoulders
and down the stations of the spine.
I know that “solid” matter is “really” empty space;
an inscrutable Matterhorn rock, a ticketed Volvo,
the human body in all of its whacko variety . . .
a momentary coalition of subatomic happenstance
in emptiness. I know that in my head; ah, but
my fingers know the shoulders are a Stonehenge
in our flesh, a hard—a nearly archeological—
Tikal, and Sphinx, and Babylonian Gates, all
with their mourners grouped at the base in their ritual garb,
all with their wizard-astronomers yearning to understand
the far star-wheel, Abu Simbel, Teotihuacan,
and along the lovely pavingstones of the Appian Way
that trail from the skull to the cleft and its hummocks.