For Jeremy Poem by Denis Mair

You wrote of smelling diesel and wood chips
After a lumber truck had passed on a country road,
And I was reminded how a heart aches for presences.
Your poems of broken connection were also vessels of hope
For withness that endures over distance.

Later you were drinking wine in a graveyard
As the night sky flickered with lightning
But you made your poem speechless
By hammering down with that line:
'This is where I am now, '
And that was all you would say:
Not a word how the wine tasted
Not a word why you went there
No fears called up by thunder.
You have taken to hiding your reveries
Preparing geysers hard to define
To be used at strategic times
In the manner of New Yorker poets.

Maybe the wine was cheap,
Your thoughts of mortality a jumble
you hardly thought worth tracing,
But wine is from grapes ripe in sunlight
And you were sitting in darkness;
Young life was contemplating its end.

You can't tell me, with your elegant mind,
You weren't weaving some kind of fabric
Across the emptiness of those extremes,
And having gotten an earlier glimpse
I'd like to collect a piece.