Elegy for Keith

Elegy for Keith

I am spending the fifth anniversary of your suicide with people
who never knew you. We are huddled around one table
at the back of the kind of dive bar you can find in anybody's
hometown: neon beer signs instead of light fixtures, red vinyl
booths bandaged with duct-tape. It is the day after Christmas

and we have not really been friends since high school and not a single
one of us has our shit together. By eleven, Merrill is drunk enough
to tell us that she knows when and how she will die, knows it
like a fast food jingle she memorized on accident and never managed
to forget although of course she won't share any of the details. Tim

is drunk enough to mutter Bullshit. Merrill swears she can do it
for anyone, swirling the ice in her gin like tea leaves, and suddenly,
I am thinking of you: how you, too, carried the knowledge of your death
within you, how you made it true. If Merrill could have scryed
the portents of your life, wheeling flocks of crows, comet after comet

spiraling across the sky, would she have known Suicide, age 41?
Or was your choice an escape from the coercion of fate, unforeseeable
to even the drunkest of psychics? Tim's drink slips from his grasp,
shattering on the table in a spray of ice and glass and shaking you
from my mind—it has been like this all day. You flicker at the base

of my skull, a candle about to gutter: I remember you and forget you
and remember again. It has been like this for five years. Later, we leave
the bar, shuffling single file into the slush of a midwinter thaw. Tim
winces as he slams the door behind us then shows me the sliver
of glass embedded in the middle of his palm, just below the life line.