Elegy Poem: So that We May Rest Into the Long Night, by Phillip Border

For Bob

What I hate about this language
is how hard it is to color
our voices in the art of affection
and still it fails us.

*

My friend who bought himself
a bottle of Jameson
and a cheap motel room
folds his hands over
his loaded revolver,
as if in prayer, then reaches
his scarred, index finger
for the trigger
like a light switch
in the dark.

Tonight, I speak to him
in the same tongue as the old gods–
in their long, volleying silences.

If I could sleep this night
I would dream a memory of him:
his bent body mixing another pail
of leaden grey, drylock paint
that we’d slather
to molded, basement walls
and speak not a word
of how such a thankless task
allowed us both to breathe
a little easier than in our own
desolate homes of longing.

I would go on covering up
the domestic wounds of that house,
abandoned by its previous newlyweds
beside him, as if the paint’s pulpy,
intoxicating fluid were as pure
as autumn rain
and make each stroke a blessing
only those inflicted
by such wounds could cast.

I would believe the lie
long enough for us both.

And when we are finished,
I would not tell him he is beautiful,
even though he was, near the end
of his middle age, the same way
a worn, plastic play doll
is beautiful in the hands of a child
the moment he begins to believe
to have outgrown such joys.

Instead, I would gather up our brushes
as I always have, into that crusted,
mop bucket sink, and wash away
the absolutions that cling to their bristles
so gravely, that even the spirits,
who call us forth from such dreams,
could not judge these hands
that deny them