TRAGIC Poem: Graceland, by Cara Losier Chanoine

in the middle of the night,
I ask myself questions
that are really games:
would I have taken your last name
if we’d gotten married?
how many books would you have written
by now?
now knowing what I do,
would I have shown up in that bar?

If your intentions are pure
I’m seeking a friend for the end of the world…
you were a personals ad in a newspaper
when neither were very popular anymore
and I wasn’t sure how you’d know who I was
but there you were
the only subtle leather jacket in the bar

I wanted a name like yours
Jacob Grace
like a comic book character
a name that sounded like
something beautiful
in language I don’t speak

you had so many notebooks
you could have built a world
on a parallel plane
and in some ways, you did
you craved authenticity
vitality
you wanted to go to Graceland
to see your own name on signs all over Memphis

the way you became mine
was immediate and total
that first night in the bar
you started calling me Trixie
instead of Beatrice
like it had always been my name
like there were things about me
that only you could see
you wrote music
and I made jewelry

and we talked about how much we hated L.A.
you bought me records and said you’d take me to Memphis
so we could disappear into the south
like characters in an Edward Eggleston print

you told me you liked the way your name looked with mine
and I wrote them superimposed onto each other
inextricable

so we packed up our life
so we could go to Graceland
so we could be the adventure
we’d come together to be
and I should have been more careful
I should have looked for the harbingers
I should have wound myself around you
the way I entangled the letters of our names

when we left the send-off dinner
the sky was a whole galaxy
and the ocean was the same temperature as the air
you said you wanted to live in this moment
if your intentions are pure…
you dove into the water
and your skin glowed blue under the moon
a piscine imp in the waves that crashed over your head
I am seeking a friend for the end of the world
for a moment you were beautiful
and then gone
and I waited for your head to break the surface
and the seconds sucked the air from my lungs
like a vacuum
a friend for the end of the world
for the end of the world
I started screaming
I kept waiting
for the end of the world
it’s the end of the world

the funeral was unbearable
I wore a designer suit that I hated
and went back to the barren apartment
where you were more gone
than I could have ever imagined
and it felt like my whole self
had leaked out through my cracked-open chest
but we were already packed
so I left the only home that we would ever have

I traveled southeast
and the air conditioner died
a few states in
so I rolled down the windows
and let the wind sand down my grit
and when I started seeing the signs for Graceland on the highway
I laughed and sobbed at the same time
I kept driving toward Memphis
and I wish you could’ve seen it
because there you were
on signs all over the city
just like you said you would be