Walking

Still in shock and tears they told stories,

your Peace Corps friends gathering

to comfort each other, comfort your father,

haggard from grief and sleeplessness

and travel, while I lay in a South African hospital,

trapped in traction and a merciful morphine haze.

Laughing and crying they told stories

of your humor, your perseverance,

your selflessness and generosity,

your famous “to do” lists marked “done”,

the people and animal photos all over

your walls, your laughable attempts

at baking, the yeasty muffins exploding

in the oven, the dinosaurs on your desk.

At the Christmas party, dancing, you had

exclaimed “I’ve never been happier!”

Someone thought we might hear one day

your voice on the wind as she still heard

her beloved brother’s voice – you

reminded her of him. Your father

told your story: the murdered sweetheart,

the long journey through darkness,

the need to bring good out of evil.

They had not known. When a friend

confessed her fear of loving and losing again,

you had replied: “If you truly love,

love is never wasted.” Another, stumbling

and choking on tears, recalled turning to you

so discouraged he was ready to leave.

“Going on,” you told him, “is like

learning to walk with an artificial leg.

It’s not you, it feels all wrong, but you put it on

anyway, you lean on it, it holds you up,

and little by little it works and then

one day you realize you’re walking.”

I remember your first walk outdoors

after her death, hunched in your black

overcoat, the fear lying thick as vaseline

upon your skin. Later we walked in the woods

through a dozen changing seasons.

Gradually, you talked, you opened

again to music, you took pictures at the zoo,

you traveled to see your sister,

recorded it all in sounds and images,

you photographed the world once more.

Animal images reappeared on your

childhood walls, as they had when you

were ten, before Dr. Who and the rock stars.

Prehistoric reptiles crowded your shelves,

dolphins swayed above your desk, where

you sat endlessly writing poems, stories, letters,

the final college paper it took three years to

complete. More often, you left your door open.

You refused to eat anything “raised to be

slaughtered.” Instead, you ate nachos in bed,

watched bad science fiction, laughed out loud.

Collecting dinosaurs, you explained

you needed that vast perspective, to know

in a thousand years all traces of you and Heather

and her murderer would be equally vanished.

You dreamed of the Peace Corps, applied,

went to Africa, grew ever more alive.

You told me you had never felt so young, so open.

The last sound I heard from you was laughter.

I’m walking, Jeremy.

I miss you always. I walk. I tell stories.

Held together with metal bars and screws

my body learned to move again,

to see me through. Following you,

I strive to truly live.

With every step I am sustained

by images of you.