Loyalty

Loyalty

Michael Collins, ambushed at Beal na Blath,

                                                                …falls again

Willingly, lastly, forknowledgeably deep

Into the hay-floor that gave once in his childhood

Down through the bedded mouth of the loft trapdoor,

The loosening fodder-chute, the aftermath…

                                                                                                Seamus Heaney

                                                                                                “The Loose Box”

I don’t say anything about you other than

you were tall: 6’7”.  And you had that flatter

than most babies face my Aunt Clara would say

was whiskey sweet.  And you packed sardines

with acute ferocity, weaving each headless fish

into their can like some grass and ash basket

a cousin tried to teach you to make.  You spoke

as though you were born with a marble

in your mouth and it clicked against your palate

and words sometimes competed to get out, like kids

at the school recess bell and the bottle neck

of bodies pushing through the double doors

into mid-January’s false thaw.  I saw you

day after day a boy before you were a man

my grandmother’s cousin’s grandson and we played

in haunted attics and under skewered alder

branches and swam in that Bay of Fundy

and you taught me to hold my breath and held me

floating the way the salt in the water never could. 

I saw you day after day before you were a man. 

Day after day.  And then I didn’t.  Maybe once.  In

your father’s restaurant.  A bus-boy rushing by

shy, another person all those years later.  Stained

apron.  Glassy eyes.  Dirty dishpan.  I’d heard

you were in and out of city shelters.  You smiled. 

Same smile.  You went into the banging kitchen

and I never saw you again.  When I heard you’d been

murdered for putting your hand on a boy’s knee

in a public park I put my face in my hands and felt you

against my ribs in that salt water, your hands

under the small of my back, holding me up to the sun.

You never let go, even after I touched bottom.  I read

that the man who killed you was a stranger a vagrant

a booze-hound from South Dakota just passing

through who’d thumbed his way all the way to Maine

and this fate: five gallons of gasoline and a dug-out

under a bridge.  One match.  By the time you were found

you were smoke and bone and nothing but

a cast off shoe and a winter coat and a business

card with the hours of your AA meetings, your sponsor’s

number smudged by the snow.