Elegy

Deadest friend, you are the Huge Feeling.

This winter we staggered in the snow, more than ever,
and when it melted there was mist – hard as a wall.

On weekends we commuted the smokiest rooms –
leaving without our coats.

You here the way in which a headless deer
can still stare,

in which zero is also a number,
in which, when you are alone, you are with yourself –

wrong – when you are alone there is nothing to you
but the people who know you are alive.

To know you were alive is worse than to know
you are now dead. Any boy who wouldn’t kiss you I hate

and I long to tell you, as if it is something I am longing
to be told, that I knew you.

That everyone who did not love us was wrong.

By Cass Coale