Elegy for Brian Young
On the t.v. the clearing images
with rain are occasionally stirred
by the rotor-blades of black choppers:
the scene, one of five major gyres
of garbage on our high seas— landfill
with the bones of animals and humans
sorting out with closed turquoise
barrels of toxins like immortal turtles over
the complicated water and its chop… they are,
with all others, searching for a mystery plane
that grabbed even you
like a common headline:
BRITISH AND AMERICAN GOVERNMENTS
LYING ABOUT TREBLE SEVEN:
over the black palms of Diego Garcia:
Jenny called last night
to say that last week
you passed with a smile
on your face that was also mysterious.
You know they used to put brilliantly light
children up in the violent crow’s-nest
of big wooded galleons and even they would,
in their queer being,
be tossed by the pitching
into the difficult waters, then
only to be reeled back in
with the white waist-rope
if not actually halved by it in pink suds, sure
these kids could fly like this twice,
even three times in a single night.
This is where the good poet and friend
generally runs out of things to see, wanting almost
anything like, let us say, garbage
for as far as the eye can see,
the simple eternal hopefulness of facts
reversing in an almost gentle wind
(We never did give a damn. Did we?)
across a stormy Indian ocean.