for Gabe

Underground, in the subway, I get a text from a friend in the US. It’s midnight over there. “got some not good news.” It’s morning when I reach the surface to call. He’s swift. 

“Gabe passed.” 

Immediately, in that sentence, flashes our angel’s face. I see it over and over: his head tucked, that slack smile and his big eyes, those bashful, complicit, teasing, coy, viciously pure eyes that part the curtain of his bad-boy veneer with a flick and a wink to say: “Yeah yeah, it’s me.” 

My chest peels from its core. I’m crying in horrible little bursts, all day, these short spasms of wretched sadness. Gabe’s face rises and my mouth is yanked into my stomach. I wince, teeth flashing like the insane, and then it passes. 

Gabe. Our rueful angel. A lick of dark hair falls to the cheek. He must have died beautifully. The thought is ridiculous and stupidly precious but it consoles me. It’s the only way I can imagine him leaving: lips parted and eyes aloft, pale as a saint stricken by the lightning that bares the dove. 

…

Remember that drive up to Boston, nighttime on the 95, 24 and knowing, already, what it means to live a life, and also what it feels like to watch it pass? 

Remember when we visited you in your apartment and you were obsessing over stingray hide, you’d figured out a way to turn cow leather into crocodile, snake, and stingray, and there on the living room floor, shirtless and a cig at the lip, you were pouring silver paint on the skins. 

…

Those who survive are condemned to see their memories turn into dog-eared pages in the book of corpses. For now, our simplest words are relieved of their banality. Into the phone we say: there are no words, and it means something. We hear I love you, and it’s true. 

Sitting beside the sadness, unassuming but present, is gratitude: I’m grateful to feel this wretched sadness because it tells me how much I loved him, and it proves that our words, no matter how worn or pre-mashed, are real. 

We carry this fleshed suitcase of a heart. When someone leaves, it hurts because they’ve been carved out of us with a cold spoon. Deaf blood pours into the missing chunk to clog the hole. When I cry in short spasms, it’s to release the clot. 

Next time you take a walk, try imagining how the strangers around you cry. 

…

In the days after Gabe passed, calling friends, his gaze held in my mind’s eye, I felt something that I want to include here for those of us in mourning. I was underground again, walking from one subway to another through the white-tiled tunnels. The immediate and endless anonymity spinning by was less real than my friend’s face in my head, and suddenly I received, the length of a few strides, a totally new feeling. It wasn’t a feeling of peace, although it was close to acceptance. Nor was it a new verbal understanding; it was a new, simple, lucid feeling, supported by two parallel images that converged like projections on tracing paper:

I
From the liquid mercury lake’s heavy surface 
rise silhouettes. Dripping, the surging busts dry 
into faces above the silver plane; the lake’s insides,
akin to the bodies’, cannot be seen. 
These figures are coated in surface, 
like the crown of water pellets expelled
after the mother-drop’s impact. 

II
Twirling on the spotlit merry-go-round, 
rising, slowing, cresting, then falling: 
proud, immobile horses with their painted eyes wide
slide up and down their stationary poles.

I + II
As the immaculate merry-go-round sinks 
the faces melt back into the sole 
surface that birthed them; 
their unsounded innards exhale into the dark.  
Time to ogle at the plastic carnival, the spotlit immaculate 
merry-go-round descends and –shhh– disappears. 

Walking the subway’s flatly luminous tunnel past all the impassive masks, I felt a part of me release from plastic specificity into diffuse darkness. I’m trying to share this feeling with you because it’s all I have to offer from my grief. This release helped me; hopefully it can help you too. 

Writing now, I’m reminded of a similar feeling that came to me the first time I read Whitman’s Song of Myself. 

A child asks the poet: “What is the grass?” 

After listing a few images (perhaps grass is “the handkerchief of the Lord,” or “a uniform hieroglyphic”), Whitman answers: 

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

Grass is the beautiful uncut hair of graves. Do you feel it? Celebrate your chest’s dissolution into soil. Your alveoli froth on the mulch. The poem continues: 

Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them, soon out of their mothers' laps,
And here you are the mothers' laps.

This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,
Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.

O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues,
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.

I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.
What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?

They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas'd the moment life appear'd.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

…

The last time Gabe and I saw each other was in July. He’d taken the subway from Soho to meet me at Barbès, one of our spots by Prospect Park. I was late. He texted:

Don’t make me drink by myself

It’s a bunch of nerds and old ppl here

I get there, we hug, order drinks. More friends are coming. There’s a Slavic brass band in the back room. Gabe is stressing about his latest contract. The client wants him and his partner to build a circular curtain made from thin strips of mirror around a two-floor spiral staircase. They’ve never done anything like this before. Even if we manage to get it built, it could fall in a week. He’s obsessed, throwing names of industrial glues and interior design firms at me as though I were getting commission. I have no idea what he’s talking about, and I like to see him like this. The others show up. Conversations slide on. We know half the bar and everyone behind it. Big, bombastic night. 

From those hours I have this image: Gabe slouched on a stool against the back wall. I turn from the bar, he looks up from his knee, we see each other, he winks. 

There it is, the magician’s sleight: in one glance, the rough boy goes tender, the dark kid flashes his light, and now, see the beautiful man proud of his beauty.