Intensest Rendezvous, On Encountering a Friend with Little Time
Chard deNiord
| poetry
for Mark Green
This is therefore the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing.
--Wallace Stevens
I would be a fool, I thought, in any effort
to greet him at the end of dinner, no matter
what I said or did. But why, why pretend
I didn't see him, then disappear as if
I hadn't been there? "No," I answered
the stare of my clean white plate.
"The darkness cannot have it, not now or ever."
So I walked to his chair and whispered
in his ear: "Hello, friend, courage teacher."
A greeting that changed to prayer, and then
an order inside the air when he responded
with a smile and strong embrace. No more.
"Noli timere," Seamus texted his wife
before he died in his Dublin bed.
"As should we in life!" I yawped on the heath
between my ears. "Keep the silence,"
the silence cried, so I mouthed the words.
"Do not fear," as if this courage were mine
to mouth and we were keeping our love
a secret from the darkness by saying goodbye
with our eyes and lips. By stabbing the air as well
with our thumbs upraised as we turned away.
Chard deNiord is the Vermont Poet Laureate and author of five books of poetry, most recently Interstate (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015), The Double Truth (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011) and Night Mowing. (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005). He lives in Putney, Vermont.