Across from the charred white bar and grill, in the place where the
Irish still bury their dead, I stood next to your grave. Looking at it
then, it didn’t seem so final.
There was a light that fell across the marker the amber color of an
empty pill bottle.
And the distance was false.
You were gone but here, like the picture you took of sailboats on
TV. Like the handwriting of a letter you wrote in 1961.
As the light faded, my vision narrowed, and I saw the grave had
grown four legs and a long, prehensile tail.
I watched as it crawled away, a green, stone-headed creature, in a
halo of blue whatever.
- Christopher Kennedy, from “Clues From the Animal Kingdom”
christopher kennedy
I Called Shotgun When You Died
I tried hard to be a ghost, so we could break into basements together to see who had whiskey and who did not, but I couldn’t die no matter how hard I tried. I stood lookout without you instead. I waited forever, but no one’s lights came on; everyone stayed asleep. You were still underground, casing the place, tangled in roots and the nests of mysterious spiders.
I called shotgun when you died, thinking we could still ride together through the neighborhood, selling bags of light to the newly dead. It didn’t seem fair that you had to cross the river by yourself.
I’m the same age I was back then, only older. The girls we loved are women now, their eyes still wet with tears.
When I dream of you, you’re always sitting on a barstool, just a kid, really, laughing when I say, I didn’t know you were still alive.
What’s new? Drugs are still good. They’re like love, getting all warm and up inside me, then ripping out my fucking heart, but in a good way, until I’ve seen 100 billion galaxies and can no longer clutch a Bible like a life preserver, as I drown in the sea of all those motherfucking stars.
Good night says the moment that brought me here, the moment we made of cotton and blood. Like an astronaut, I look for you in the flare of the genius sun in the blue-black sky, while terror draws a picture with its finger on my bedroom window—sand-worm, drought-fish, day-ghost—hieroglyphics I come to understand eventually: There is no sun. There are no stars. The coast is never clear.
- Christopher Kennedy