I would prefer to be writing odes, not elegies. But I’m at the awkward age when everybody starts to leave the planet. Although I suppose an elegy really is a type of ode, praising those lost. Lost along with old friends and my checkered youth is Joanne Scaturro. No one sweeter ever lived.
The Great Escape
For Joanne
I remember us all in the park along the river that summer.
Tommy was playing a Donovan Leitch tune on the recorder:
“First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then
there is.” America looked like a place to put behind us then,
after the war had burned the Summer of Love to the ground.
It was me, Karen, you, Tommy, and a few other regulars
who plotted the great escape: We would up sticks to Australia
and live off the land together in the Outback, pure and free.
All we had to do was keep it together until after graduation.
But we graduated, it seems, from each other as well as school.
I’m the last of us now. The park is snowed in, the river frozen.
Tommy went first, lost to love in that first inferno of AIDS.
Then Karen, to drugs and cancer and traumatic memory.
And just last night, you– I heard from afar of your passing,
from Mark, down in Texas, who saw your face on Facebook.
It was all so long ago, but the long ago burns all the brighter
in an old man’s mind. I know your smile. At the school dance,
you’re in front while Tommy shows off behind the keyboard.
I see you walking toward me, arms spread out wide for a hug.
I have the park to myself now. But it was so much sweeter once.
Haunting.