Newness and the nameless

A thumbtack marked each city he’d seen

on the map on his wall in that room

already blanketed in photos and books, a layer to muffle

or absorb whatever roared in his head.

In one picture he took himself, his naked torso glowed whitely,

white hipbone jutting below a smooth stomach,

frame cupping his form. “I want to go out of this world the way I came in,

naked,” he said. To be devoured,

body lain limp on a high mountain

for the birds to wrench apart.

His hands traced the map west, north, talking of

Manifest Destiny, the Yukon, the Iditarod Trail.

Brown and bright-skinned after hiking the glacier, he had a mouthful

of Thoreau and wide binoculared eyes later in tall grasses

humming with mosquito clouds. A flash of red,

the bright bird, and no guidebook to name her.

In my fifth grade class,

each dogsled rider had a thumbtack

as we charted their movements over Alaska’s ragged shape.

But no one could fear, listening to him,

that everything that could be mapped, had been

or was divided in portions of the already-discovered. All energy pushed

toward newness and the nameless.

The air almost sharpens with ice crystals and pine

when I think of him now, a string of thought leading me

to blood flowing from chapped nostrils, dry cold altitude, as the trail

drops, wiped out in a white-out. Paws fly fleet and strong

pounding an unyielding earth. All blaze like a bullet

through the blankness, half-frostbit and gasping

but pure as a burned-down forest, all ash washed away.

I haven’t cried for you in weeks,

not since the night when I knew you were gone.

The last time, you hardly spoke,

in the art museum, cold marble and blasted air conditioning.

Your face was like the statues, maybe like it was

in the casket, but I didn’t go to the wake with those people

who had talked of you in past tense for a year.

Once I wanted you, now I just want a piece of your brain

to pulse in my open palm, let it whisper

all those words I half-understood, and forgot.

In my head, when I pressed it to the bathroom tile,

you flew through a white frontier –

grim as iron, you shone

into a space

no one’s yet discovered.