Tom

Dear Tom:

The sky in Brooklyn is not like the sky in Houston.

No spaceships. No rockets. Just the planes

 

steadily taking off from La Guardia, rising over the Hell Gate

toward Chicago and L. A. Toward you and Luke.

 

I have resisted the urge to get on one of those planes,

to enter the sky again, the blue expanse, the return to Texas,

 

to you and the quiet church basement.

The highway stretching toward Austin.

 

There is no place you wouldn’t drive me in your red car.

No place you wouldn’t come to meet me. To watch me.

 

Dear Tom:

You never cried, not even once. But I did.

My arms crossing my belly to grip my grief.

 

My back bending forward to the floor.

And out side the Oak trees rustled against the wind.

 

Their long branches leaning toward the earth.

 

Dear Tom:

Montrose Boulevard runs straight through town.

Sometimes I imagine you walking up and down the street.

 

Stopping in at McDonald’s to get a hamburger,

to sit and wait out the long hours of pleasure and withdraw.

 

Pleasure and withdraw are fine lines,

Too hard to walk for people like you. For people like us.

 

To walk through that line, to break it, means to confess:

Oh Lord I am powerless. Oh Lord I am powerless.

 

Dear Tom:

The sky in Brooklyn is hard to see at night,

the light pollution rendering it a dull gray.

 

But I live on Bedford Avenue, which stretches

down to the sea.

 

Which is the inverse of the sky. The underside of transcendence.

The coastline. The edge. The saltwater licking the threshold.

 

The Gulf of Mexico. The Atlantic.

And the stars peering into themselves from above.

 

From the universe above.