Last Elegy

On dead love and high school football

With a steady hand he sliced down the scaled belly of the spotted bass he’d lured from the river. It lay dead on the dock, pale and round like the Ozark hills, a bared shoulder. Though we’d been drinking since ten-thirty that morning, Henry’s movements didn’t betray his drunkenness like mine did. I turned away at the sight of the cut, thought of breast implants and C-sections, and began to love him less.

That night I lay my body down on the splintered dock. I love you less, I said. He didn’t hear me over the muddy current, the blunt wind or the thrill of the catch. I ached for the fish because it was his, and I was too.

The summer he died, I wrote bad, dishonest elegies of an uncomplicated love. I soon tired of lying in blank verse, so I penned my dead Henry an ode to high school football:

The game was a bust—

you dropped the ball and let your

best friends down, your dad left

at halftime and at one point the head coach

called it a disgrace, but soon enough

you and your girl are outside town and she’s

undone her seatbelt, feeling around in the dark

for quarters to pay the meter with

thinking all lips

are your lips, all music music

you have an opinion about;

how you moved

over foreign turf through enemy

boys like rain hitting the riverfront,

alive in the impossible body—

take off your clothes—

the sun stopped over

your girl’s sweet head

and withdrew from the hilltops crowing.

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I wished, for a long time, that I’d done something as banal as pointing out the stars that night we spent smoking on the dock. It clung, the smell of us — motel sheets, his coat, my hair — and sickened me. But the sky, if only I’d mentioned it: as impossible as the body that sheds its fear of changing shape.

- Look at the stars, I could have said.

- The stars are lumps of rock, he’d answer.

- Are they? I thought they were like tiny suns that invented the world.

In the falling heat, the gravel walk home, I looked at Henry, whom I suspected of some ridiculous activity like contemplating nature or the nature of man. But he was looking back at me, and I saw in that look that he had heard what I said on the dock, that we loved each other less, we’d followed this thread of young hurried desire as far as it went.

The stars are indeed magnificent, Freud replied to Kant’s cosmological proof of the existence of God.