In memory of C. K. Williams
I happened to be putzing around in the Gellert Spa in Budapest
while you did your very best
to hold on to the world-brim. I was stretched in a thermal bath
even as Syrian refugees struggled to find a path
across the border at Zakay. Two of the many top-of-the-line
treatments on offer featured red wine
and chocolate. It was in Peru, Vermont,
in the late 80s I first heard you vaunt
Vallejo and Neruda. You were so tall I could no more reach you
for a farewell hug than scale “The Heights of Macchu Picchu.”
My own ancestors had floated down the Danube
on a combination of a pigskin inner tubes
and a somewhat overblown
sense not only of their own
expertise in cooperage and smelting copper
and telling whopper after whopper
but the intrinsic importance of things
Celtic. In the National Museum of Hungary I gaped at rings
with intricate spirals much as I’d once admired
the wedding band Catherine made for you. I lay now in my hired
canary swimming togs in an outdoor pool, a pool renowned
for being the first to feature a wave machine. The burial mound
of the Dohany Street synagogue dates from 1945.
From time to time a big-breasted woman has been known to dive
into the headwaters of the Danube and return to the fold
in Ireland itself, between the Paps of Danu. The mire and mold
of the world would become your subjects, of course,
be it the Hun buried astride his horse
with a rusted bell and garnet-encrusted gold
paraphernalia or the Dohany Street mound that holds
the bodies of 2000 Jews starved by the Arrow Cross.
Except for 15 minutes in the hour the wave machine is at a loss
as to how it’s persevered
since 1927. Almost 90 years, Charlie. Almost 90 years.
That it will be starting soon
is announced, it would seem, by a little signature tune
on the speakers. In addition to those forced to march
from here to Austria, so many more would pass under the arch
in Auschwitz-Birkenau. The peril
that faced Saint Gellert as his nail-spiked barrel
went rolling down the hill
would be amplified until
the needle bent. When I’d blithely asked Catherine to replicate
your silver ring it hadn’t struck me you and I would mate
for life like Herr Tukhus and Frau Tukhus.
Were it not for the lining of mucus
a poet’s mind, like a stomach, will happily digest itself.
I’d left my silver wedding band on the shelf
in cabin 108 to protect it from sulfur, oblivious to the fact
that even such temerity, such tact
as you’d always shown—
the grace that had, if anything, grown—
wouldn’t help you at the world-brim, wouldn’t save
you from the force of that much anticipated, unexpected wave.
