For Jack Myers

Jack, if you are looking for me, my room is in back,
in the far depths of the Boston Sheraton, my locked window overlooking a shaft of brick and exhaust covers, a maintenance court squared by four distinct wings. Here, the shaded wind is trapped, less sure. Split off from upper currents, it vacillates and veers, a dizzying indecision embodied in the snow it wields—urgent, whirling cyclones of it—swept from rooftop heaps by happenstance. Watching this, I recall the shoreline at Winthrop, and how we set some ashes just beyond the water’s edge, where the tide would rise and claim you. You had become so very small. It seemed more just than trusting fickle winds. And it felt wrong to cast you on the waters, to see you drown in a dark your poems forestalled. Instead, the welling deep came almost tenderly, tugging first at the edges of the mound, then seeping inward to dampen the core, to draw you not so much out into the ocean as down into the rich coast’s shore, a peace below the current’s roiling reach. There, on that beach, it was as if some timeless otherness proffered a passage home….No, Jackie, nothing quite so worn or bland—it was more a steadfast, sweaty partner, guiding you toward a crowded floor and music we can enter, but never understand.