Envoi
BY DONALD PLATT
Do not remember
me. But if you must, think of me only as the man who four
short years ago
wooed you, walked hand in hand with you along a forest path past
bluebells.
I wanted to stop and count them but couldn’t. They were too many.
Don’t think of me
as I am now—pain radiating down right leg from spine that is a child’s
stack of building blocks
teetering. Think of us, if you must, floating down the Tippecanoe River
in colored tubes like huge
donuts whose upper halves were clear plastic. We could see
how they contained
heaping handfuls of glittery confetti. Your gold tube had gold confetti.
Mine was silver with silver
confetti. We drank pinot grigio from a cooler that floated alongside us.
We toasted the sun
beating down upon us and drank from plastic picnic cups.
You counted twenty-one
great blue herons. We lost track of how many snapping turtles lay sunning
on rocks or kept sliding
into the water with a small plop like fresh green cow flops as we floated
past. Hazy
afternoon stretched endlessly before us. No longer. Someone
drives nails through
my lumbar vertebrae. You don’t have to push this wheelchair
up death’s mountain.
That is my task alone. I must go now. If you do look back, please see me
as the full moon
rising slowly last night over your horizon to hang its golden
warty gourd
on night’s dark bending vine. I shine with light I stole from you.
Daytime comes. I dim.
