Burial at Sea

i.m. Alan Sullivan

I. Burial at Sea

Two thousand miles south of our frozen orchard
the boat we hired, a forty foot Tiara,
threaded the maze of channels from Las Olas,
bearing a box of ashes and your mourners.

Fathers Patrick O’Shea and Tom O’Dwyer,
our Irish shepherds from The Little Flower,
read from St John (not Paul, they showed you mercy!)
to bury you at sea. The rite was Roman.

Singing the Navy Hymn, my voice, not breaking,
easily drowned the thrum of diesel engines
pinning us to the wind. Your wreath was orchids.

I walk a jet ramp, bound for North Dakota,
bearing an urn to bury in our orchard
beside the ashes of the labs who loved you.

II. The Widower

Talk to the dead? It is a form of prayer
employed by lonely people who grow old.
When Conscience sadly rocks its creaking chair
over the little sins we’ve never told
a priest wearing his stole, our dead are there.
The present fades, the past lengthens its hold,
and that way lies senescence and despair.

III. Aubade

How’s Heaven? Have you finally found your voice,
the operatic tenor of a star?
Do you play harp better than that guitar
you lugged, age twenty-two, from bar to bar?
Do angels sing your psalms when they rejoice?

By day I write, by night I dream of you.
Purgatory enough for any man,
your suffering according to God’s plan—
He forged our friendship when the world began,
a partnership that we will soon renew.

IV. Fording the Green

A pine log bridged the stream. We chose to ford,
knowing we’d fall were we to try that log
with heavy packs, and miles left in our slog
to the Green River Entrance. We had soared,
surmounting Squaretop, frying cutthroat trout
I caught on flies flung from a spinning rod.
Sunburned and blistered, time we two hiked out,
I scrunched a screeching pika in the sod
which not long since was buried deep in snow.
Poor little beast. Now fifteen miles to go.
The Green was green because of glacial melt.
A fringe of ice had shelved on either bank,
and how we screamed! Up to our waists we sank.
Never before, friend, had we climbed so high.
We played the cards that two gay boys were dealt
and clutched each other as we kissed the sky.

V. Summiteer

We roped only when we traversed a glacier
or scrambled up a snow-choked, granite chimney.
We were not climbers, merely lowly trekkers
with sturdy boots, who rarely strapped on crampons.
How many times we summited on mountains
that opened our perspectives to a fastness
of ice and bergschrund seldom seen by hikers.

Now disembodied, love, you climb the Eiger,
its north face, which the Germans call der Mordwand,
the Death Wall, for the sixty-four who fell there.
You’re twenty-two again. Weary of heaven,
you roam the foothills of the Himalayas.
Last week you camped beside Kali Gandaki.
Tomorrow you will conquer Dhaulagiri.

VI. Eagle Banquet

In age we range between our teens and eighties.
Two boys who served last summer on the camp staff
sit to eat lunch surrounded by their elders,
ignoring us, eyes only for each other,
so rapt in limerence they make me joyous.
How do I know? Call it an old scout’s gaydar.

When love matched us, we were some three years older.
Our partnership endured almost four decades
despite two struggles, alcohol and cancer.
Now all bow heads to say grace with our chaplain.
I don’t pray for the Boy Scouts or our nation
but happiness like ours for two young Eagles.

Limerence: word coined by Dorothy Tennov,
“romantic love which verges on obsession”.
It is no mere teenage infatuation,
no, limerence outlives its adolescence,
then stares on tempests and is never shaken
and sweeps lovers away into their eighties.
When it attacks, how fortunate its victims.