Mentor, we’re talking

by Alexander Etheridge

Sudden winter, unfashionably cold rain —
You may know this, changed now into everywhere
by the shadow’s knick.

And word for November frigid and rain, we waiting for the murk       to
crystallize through oblique semiosis made
bizarrely decipherable by the white left on the
page.  Us in rooms where the wasting met you years later, years           ago (a
high startled math suggests all time is at
once, and one moment’s twitch, eternal — every thing heaped up        and cross–
hatched, the immensity of its scale and
mass quicker than a face in the knives) Us still 90 proof summer

on your back porch, a sound of ancient sparks
under scar tissue.
I was see – through and scared
but you lifted heavy girders up from the scattering
and bolted them into place,
reminded me I was there, that we were
there looking when
June dusk, that to earn just seconds in the tower means we’ll be          ripped and
scalded (expulsions of bone and light / dad’s arc of descent.)  Hour and grain of
tidal sediment, the invisible book trick (or that line I          had about sawing off my
left leg) — the hard
sonics you know and knew I

didn’t know at all.  We’re still
there, at once here too and now, an
us, but I can’t get back to you then.
I wanted to tell you something
but the shape of its number had changed.
I recall, but I can’t know if you’re dead
or ever — hand in subtle flight,
listening, telling me look with a sleepless ear
for signs of the other world.