MARC DESMOND REPRISE

     by Jackie Sheeler

Tonight, Marc Desmond, your poems
will take the stage once more, after a long time away,
a four year word vacation. Word was where you lived,
more there than in your inconvenient body,
lopsided with unprocessable sugars, unlosable fats,
slowly going hairless in the most annoying way—
top-down, as if God had poured a jar of Nair on you
and let it do its work over the years.

I liked the way you showed your yellow teeth
to the big disease, snarling at it
until the D of diabetes went
from upper-case to lower-case and finally
shrank against the wall, deballed, cowering,
robbed of the power to kill you.
Which, of course, it didn’t.
Which, of course, you’ll never know.
A stopped heart spared you the years
of incremental amputations and general decline—
gave you an ending as ironic as one of your own poems:
snapped off like a burned-out bulb
among the dusty books, a book
the last thing on this earth you reached for,
the last thing on this earth you held—
word was where you lived,
word was where you died,
and word is all your old friends
can give for you tonight.