David Clewell
i.
If there really is a Great Beyond,
or even a Pretty Good Beyond,
you’re the only person I know
I could actually spend that kind of time with
and not be sneaking a look at my watch every eon or so.
If we all return to particles of dust
or ambient light or the subatomic glory
of far-flung Alpha Centaurian star-stuff,
then I want at least some of my particles
right in the thick of your come-hither particle whirl.
If we have voices, then I can promise you
I’m home-free. I’d know your golden-tongued delivery
anywhere. Even without the benefit of ears,
I’d vibrate up and down the length
of whatever I’ve somehow managed to become.
And if we have any kind of explicit shape—
ethereal projections or holograms or exotic
see-through apparitions of whoever we used to be—
I’ll do my best to contain my ectoplasm
until you’ve manifested your own ectoplasm.
ii.
If there’s any Afterlife at all, who better than the once-skeptical
Houdini to say so, according to the plan worked out with his wife,
just in case, before he died: a prearranged message, to be conveyed
to his living Bess, reaching back through the complications of so much
time and space, touching on their earliest, easiest days in love—
but a message so ridiculous on its surface that no medium ever
would scam together those particular words out of spiritless thin air.
Just because she never heard them doesn’t mean Houdini wasn’t
really somewhere, more desperate than usual to find at last
even one genuine clairvoyant. For all we know, he might have been
busting his metaphysical gut to answer the curtain call of a lifetime.
It doesn’t mean they’re not together again, traveling the boondocks
of some untold astral realm, living out of a trunk that won’t quit
and making a name for themselves all over again.
So when I’m that far gone myself, away from you for who-knows-
how-long, as long as it isn’t for good, here’s what I propose.
I want you to listen hard for the phrase we fell in love with
together, right away, all night and always at the Idle Hour Lounge,
where Tiny poured you a sturdy tumbler of his sorry house wine
while passing his down-to-earth assurance: You get more
in a regular glass. We thought we’d died and gone to Taproom Heaven.
But three years later, that was Tiny instead. He’s still pouring,
still larger than life on the Other Side, if it’s there. And maybe
he can help me get across to you, again, those words to live by.
If you hear them from either one of us, I’m telling you now
there you’ll have it—absolute proof of our kind of spirit world,
forever living up to its good name.
iii.
And if it turns out there’s only the Great Right Now,
and we have no better offers, nowhere else we’re eventually
supposed to be, you’ll have to pardon me for thinking
I can live with that. Some nights with nothing but you
to hold onto, I’ve been eternally grateful anyway.
I’ve felt as if I could have lived forever, without question,
at that breathtaking latitude and longitude, right here
on Earth as it is. As surely it was always meant to be.
And when, in this version, it comes to dying, I want you there,
holding your pocket mirror up to the very end of my breathing
while I steam it silly for as long as I possibly can—
as if we’re living in some never-ending 19th-century novel
where there’s no machinery in sight that could measure
the vital signs packing every one of their impossibly small bags
or the height I’m about to fall from, once and for all,
with you still somehow on my lips, all the way down into what
I’m guessing is the not-so-perfectly accommodating ground.
