Campus Visit

Their scholar-athlete, seventeen and fast,
runs on ahead through landscaped aspen shade.
They’d hoped a day-trip visit to the past
might strike some spark, but find themselves dismayed
at seeing nothing they can recognize
outside the quad’s faux-Georgian. How it broods,
New Campus; how the gray-faced boxes rise
where once the intimate silences of woods
had taught the whole arcanum of the body
to eager learners. Something like dementia:
this puzzled search for what’s no longer here.
In town, new bars present themselves for study,
but the old places govern in absentia.
Nothing is what it was, not even beer.

But here’s the river, blessedly the same—
though from this taller bridge, the longer view
down at the rowers’ synchrony and skim
muffles the thudding noise their young veins knew,
the coxswain yelling as the oarsmen strained.
Let it be so, then. Let their daughter rule
the day, that daughter sprinting with the wind.
The father need not call to mind a girl
drunk and puking in his English text;
the mother can suppress her memories
of a soulless frat boy bragging who he’d fucked.
The breeze picks up. They clutch the rib-knit necks
of jackets flimsy as the verities
their only child will learn to deconstruct.

The Patient Prays for the Grace of A Happy Death

but the fears persist:
At the end—just
as he braces against
the Spirit-gust—

he’ll open his eyes
to a face that sneers
from the rank abscess
of an old knife-twist,
closing. Close.
So close he could spit.

And that’ll be it.