"September 15"

Timm at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where he had
his near-fatal accident in October 1981.

The following is from one of the verse letters I have been writing to Timm since he died, a meditation on a song we apparently both deeply loved.

* * *

… Eventually the sobs dried and the rage
coagulated into that solace of emptiness
washed by tears, my wife sobbing, whispering
There There. We held each other on
the couch for a good while, our old
stray cat Zooey sitting fretfully by our feet,
the two of us promising to make this
thing work, our marriage, our
work in the world, to live well, decently,
and love, not just each other and this house
but others too, the world, even now, when
so much is vastly going wrong.

Later I listened to iTunes on your Powerbook
as I researched the meds you were taking,
threading back together the broken strands
of your death after talking with your girlfriend
about how you behaved in the weeks
before you died (she talked of complications
you felt after running, trouble breathing, a tiny
hole discovered in your lungs on visits
to the doctor, the prescriptions filled
two weeks you were felled by the Big One.)

The last songs you played on your iTunes
were from Pat Matheny’s ‘81 album “As
Wichita Falls, So Falls Wichita”, an album
I loved so desperately that year,
In the season after my heart broke
the first time. I wanted so
much to heal that grief was an Orphic
track through my psyche’s underworld,
pointing my way towards a health, if not
quite bringing me home ...

That was also the season in which you were
nearly killed in a car crash, thrown from
the back of a Volkswagen Beetle, your
head nearly shattered, coming back so
slowly from real death … “September 15”
was the song I loved best from that album --
weirdly, because that was the day my
love left me; as it turns out you listened
to that track on the very day of your death,
at some decent a.m. hour when you must
have been getting ready for work.

Did you know as I found out 15 years
later after falling in love with that
song that it was Lyle Mays’
eulogy for the pianist Bill Evans who
died of a heart attack on Sept. 15 1981,
the day of the year my heart nearly died
and the season in which you fell closest
to death without dying? I found Bill
Evans that way, some some comment
in the liner notes of “As Wichita Falls”
leading me on to find out who this guy
was and discovering “You Must Believe
in Spring” at the library, a seminal
album of such gorgeous music
that led me in strange ways to my wife ...

Oh we spiral every which way through each
other bro, DNA strands or some whorl of
soul-poetics which fates us, for better or
ill, to love so consumingly the same
wonderful, damaging sounds ...

A movie my wife and I watched last night was
a comedy of sorts, where a man loses
his beloved wife in an auto accident
but her heart goes into another woman
whom he accidentally meets and falls
in love with, one love morphing into
another the way our losses of ‘81
found their way into this present.

Your girlfriend Christie says that on
the day you died you lay with her in
the park, her head on your chest without
any discomfort in you ... Did hope of
love keep you mum or were you
really feeling healed, maybe enough
to trust her head there, listening to
that fated heart beat its Yes?

It was fair and warm in Salem until
the night you died and then it turned
cold again, cold and rainy and snowy,
the coldest winter weather on record
for that late in the year. The old dark
returned, snatching spring from our hands,
the one you tried to live and died of.

Perhaps I will too. But we’ll all be killed
off eventually, so I might as well keep on
playing that sad classical guitar of
“September 15,“ plucking the ivories
as Lyle Mays did in emulation of his
teacher in beauty Bill Evans, mining
the truth which is beauty’s up from the heart,
so sad, so infinitely rich that such
love, I believe, belongs to a god
who rides us, for better and ill,
all the way to the distant white shore,
singing all the way.

It was after midnight when my wife
and I finally went to bed, holding hands
in the dark, whispering to each other
that we hope we can make it and
missing your terribly, wondering
from deep in our wounded hopeless
hearts how yours could have failed
saying Yes so loudly from its altar.

No answers in dreams last night,
precious little here today, except
in that old, Orphic way: all of
the morning stilled to listen,
augmented to infinity around
my lost little brother’s smile.
Oh its with the lowest register
of the voice that I sing on
these pages today, crying all this ink,
surely not angry or gorgeous
enought to count but hey, there’s
no tally sufficient enough to bring you
back in any way, though we try,
doomed, yet happy to find
you still resonant, somewhat smiling.