Envoi, Dylan Kelly, 2006

"You, you who grew titan legs & arms & plucked with angelic delicacy
the heartstrings of a Brooklyn Bridge and jumped devotionless
into a sea of shame & moral debt, hardly forgotten; who
crafted art in the likeness of the stones you carried one by one,

never wiping the sweat from your brow till the work was done;
drank celestial brandy through a straw, turned on a phrase,
shot a dandy lion from Utah, then jumped ship to coastal France,
leaving only a woman's sparkling hide & a black cricket
falling off 'the spit spoked across the fire silhouetted against
the blackness of a true American night alone; hung a gown of crimson

silk on a nail split into a cedar attic wall & lie naked on the bed,
assuming the position & role of the ultimate arcane ambiguity,
the sexuality of not-to-know; who purr & purr around my feet
& purr until a million bleeding ears buckle to their knees
& finally pray, then being the silence they were meant to offer;

with your inscriptions bound in soluble glue,
written in vaguely ambrosial ink
a million times over yet scarcely read or breathed or consumed,
Please tell Dylan not to die, to love, what the hell to do."