A Poem For Sunday

“At the Beach” by Elizabeth Alexander:

Looking at the photograph is somehow not

unbearable:  My friends, two dead, one low

on T-cells, his white T-shirt an X-ray

screen for the virus, which I imagine

as a single, swimming paisley, a sardine

with serrated fins and a neon spine.

I’m on a train, thinking about my friends

and watching two women talk in sign language.

I feel the energy and heft their talk

generates, the weight of their words in the air

the same heft as your presence in this picture,

boys, the volume of late summer air at the beach.

Did you tea-dance that day? Write poems

in the sunlight? Vamp with strangers? There is

sun under your skin like the gold Sula

found beneath Ajax’s black. I calibrate

the weight of your beautiful bones, the weight

of your elbow, Melvin,

on Darrell’s brown shoulder.

(From Crave Radiance: New and Selected Poems © 2010 by Elizabeth Alexander. Reprinted with kind permission of Graywolf Press. Photo of Fire Island in the autumn by Harvey Barrison)