John Amen

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Elegy for Amen

                   —ars poetica

Amen sat at the untuned piano, improvising his animal opera: Black Rhino blues, psalm of the Sabre-Toothed Tiger. Each day those notes blazed & vanished; the next day he started over: The Irish Elk’s adagio, gospel of the Woolly Mammoth. He scribbled arpeggios in his sleep, in the morning splashed paint on a gray wall. With a passing thought, he froze the waters around a hunting boat a mile north of Cape Horn. The homeless & addicted gathered, clapping their hands. That was before the continental flood, the piano flushed into the culvert, the halfway house foundering in chemical waves. Amen bellowed the march of the Dire Wolf replete with sign-language improvs. He was bathed in white light, dashed with hieroglyphics. Across the muddy globe, zebras & gorillas & giraffes plunged into a frothing current. Amen prayed for the extinct & endangered. He gurgled the soliloquy of the Caribbean Monk Seal, sounding like Quint or Ahab or Max Cady chained to a plastic throne. He wrestled those waters until he couldn’t wrestle anymore. In my dreams, I—they call me John—I comb the ocean’s floor, looking for his body. 

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Glimmer

One by one, we showed up, offering apologies, me for vanishing when the soldiers arrived, Pete for his denials. Jude appeared, rash on his neck, mumbling sorry over & over for that kiss at dawn. It was hard to come down—the days of awe, heaving crowds, private planes, adrenaline churning like the Mississippi in April. Jesus sat in a lawn chair, staring at the sky. His palms hadn’t fully healed, small tunnels into another universe. He liked red-headed woodpeckers & the southern accent. He watched cartoons. Lampglow poured down, revealing his wrinkles, cracks in his voice, cracks in his words. After a month in the trees, we woke one morning, & he was gone. Tom searched the house, Mary walked the trails, we called his name. We never saw him again, those wondrous stories gutted by the tabloids. Years later, lost in the suburbs, I forgot who to pray to. I understood what it means to fall, how that distant life still glimmers like dry lightning on a summer night, it was never mine to own.

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Banner Art:
Smilodon populator, Charles Robert Knight, the American Museum of Natural History, Wikimedia Commons