This Is Not An Elegy
For poet Mick Burrs, aka Stephen Michael Berzensky (1940-2021)
—Bruce Rice
Your body it seemed to me was always hungry, always leaning like it was
about to speak, but what did I know back then: there’s a kind of language
a person can’t utter unless it’s lived—this task of breath and setting down,
and still—the whole world’s mystery. And somewhere among things falling
you gently let yourself down from a propped branch of the family tree,
a young man leaving those iridescent bungalows and blue pools
and someone else’s idea of how it’s supposed to be. If I knew you then
it’s because a voice carries everything we are: your voice, my name
and how it sounded when you said it, and the thing you were telling
had a song in it and a grief and that relentless holy thing
poets can’t attain. I cannot think of you without certain sadness
for all those early versions of yourself folded and stitched in neatly
cropped books of whatever keeps a person alive: for the price of a story
it’s still you proudly adhering to the life you chose. This warm night
I don’t intend an elegy. I feel the light of the hour pass through me.
Yourself, as you predicted: closer now in this small quiet
so we may speak to each other with perfect clarity.