THE FAR-WHISPERED SECRET

- elegy for the dead man

we saw behind school

by the train tracks

below the Howard Street bridge

there is dead man juice

in our heads.

he pressed all our hearts,

put them in his shirt pocket.

the report said

parts of earth are infested

with revolting drifters;

a constellation of notebook pages

swirl a slow twist

around the icy nobody.

we say Gone gone gone totally gone

he say Hey moon shoes how about this!

out in space!

out in space

one of the first things

you come to know

is that your knees

seem to get cold

before the rest-

your feet, your fingertips, your face.

next

you smell cedar

and you don’t know where on earth

it came from.

then, however, you marvel

at the simplicity of the closed system cycling

and recycling on itself.

you keep drifting through places

with people standing

off to the side.

you float and listen in:

rooms with people talking in them

and you can’t believe

it really is like this.

you say you

liked it.

you say you think you liked it

more when, spacey, they

played the game plain

as if you really didn’t know

they were there doing what

they were doing

& it really didn’t matter anyway

hey yea babe

& you really don’t believe

how you could be one

place

la bas

down

in your own self

round midnight

one week

& three weeks later

be out in space

all over the place

moon shoes laced with rainbows in a white cloud

like now

who is out there?

robot kids out there

feeding on thin air juice

like you just ooze along like

selling ice cream

same way you did last

thirty-five, fifty years

you just get by

pay the bills

save face

run in place

like there’s got to be

a buyer in the place

like you really can’t believe

if you took all the skin

shades of the human race

and blended them

until there wasn’t a trace

of anything other than one colored face

what color would we be then ?

orange vapor trail

after image of electron

phosphorescent comet trail

racing

flash

in space

~Joseph Cardarelli 1982