Elegy Trying to be a Psalm

by Richard Jackson

For Wilbur

Because it is not here it is eternal
– W.S. Merwin

Crows imitating human voices, a Field Sparrow
imitating a cricket, Blue Jays imitating hawks
Catbird, Cattle Egret, Snail Kite, Herring Gull,

sometimes it seems everything is filled with
other spirits, as the Cherokee know.
This evening,
it was not the hawk smudging past me, then
slicing into the trees,
but your soul reminding me
we are always moving elsewhere.
The dead
are invisible, not absent, St Augustine wrote.

We know this the way we see sounds and hear
colors, the way we never see the plane whose
distant hum points us to its past,
or the seed
ready to flower at our feet.
In this way
nothing is ever finished.
In Milano once, I wept
for Michelangelo’s Pieta Rondanni, two figures
trying to escape the stone the master abandoned,
two souls he still inhabits
as a repeated dream
that seems, somehow, to still chip away at the air.

I think this hawk has waited on the porch post for
me to say or do something he already suspects.

I would like to tell you what has happened since
you left,

but it is enough now to speak to these
souls reminding us they are not simply what we see--

the speckled moth I just mistook for a butterfly,

the whole galaxy moving away but taking us
with it,
the invisible day stars,
the mourning doves
taking over for the owls,
and these words for you,
always waiting for what is always arriving.

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Richard Jackson is the author of 17 books of poetry including The Heart as Framed: New and Select Poems, and 12 books of essays, interviews, translations, editions and anthologies. Winner of Guggenheim, Fulbright, NEA, NEH and Witter Bynner Fellowships, and the Order of Freedom from the President of Slovenia for his literary and humanitarian work during the Balkan wars; he has also edited 30 chapbooks from eastern European poets and his poems have been translated into 17 languages.