Suddenly

Rita, I’m angry, but not with you. (Having woken to tubes and shame,
white curtain swathing my psych ward bed like the membrane of heaven,
I have no right to be angry with you.) I’m angry at the ways our lives
implode like doomed buildings. Like Three Rivers Stadium—
giant concrete ashtray erased from the event horizon because it was
too late, and things that seemed eternal weren’t there anymore.
Sucked into a black hole I can’t flatten with the gravity of nostalgia.

Danny broke your news, in a bar where graffiti of poets and singers drips
from the walls like tributes shouted through relentless rain. Constrained
by his courtroom suit, though loosening the red noose of his tie. His face
gone broad and kindly, like someone’s father’s, and his booming voice
that has freed the innocent and guilty kicking down a notch—as if a ghostly
hand were adjusting an invisible stereo, finding a level for loss.

I should have known—before I searched your obituary, told truth falling
slant between the lines. Suddenly. No cause but that, no cause. Had left
a senior partnership. Suddenly. Was doing work in her parish. Suddenly.
A wonderful volunteer for her son’s school. Suddenly. And in the list,
no mention anywhere of your husband as survivor, not one trace.

Suddenly—goddammit—suddenly.

Jump cut to our summer afternoon at Three Rivers, in one of your family
luxury boxes. Prosciutto lapping the silver trays, and you concerned
I couldn’t eat anything. (Me, the peacenik who never renounced hotdogs.)
You and your handsome husband were leaving for Ireland, while I
was climbing upward with mine, mistaking a wheel for a ladder.
We were young; the air was cool and thin; he wore a Kelly green blazer.
Early evening sun lit up your long red hair like clouds of glory. 

And after the game, as swept bases flared under hot lights like dying souls
while the turf turned the color of steel, I felt no premonition, no shiver
of the depth charges they would lay in those bunkers—tectonic changes—
no ripple of that fourth river of molten slag that bubbles, insidious
and furious, flowing under our foundations and through them, suddenly