The wife I was married to then shot me
as I lay next to the giant log on the shore
in about the spot where Laura’s body
washed up. Back then, we didn’t know
how it was going to develop. It was 1993.
She had to wind the film forward by hand.
I pilfered a stone from that rocky beach
before we returned to our rental car
and the silence of our failing marriage.
Did I think of it as a mere souvenir
from our pilgrimage? Or as a charm
against possession, against Bob, against
repeating loops? She was my second wife,
after all. Whatever it was, it’s stayed with me,
cradled now in this decades-older hand.
Why am I thumbing this stone like a talisman
this morning, thirty years later, as I listen
to the opening bass notes and the swell
of synthesizer that haunted our past?
Each Thursday night in 1990’s spring,
that bass and synth were something
that we shared even as everything else
was starting to fall away. That show’s theme
made the world terrifying and full of hope
at once, offered us something beyond time
and space and failure. Something that surely
couldn’t end. The man who wrote it is dead now,
nine months gone. Is this stone as smooth today
as it was when I plucked it from the shore,
or have the years worn its rough edges further?
Can time do that in the darkness of a drawer?
As always, I’m filled with questions. Laura
was filled with secrets and wrapped in plastic
and dead. And maybe undead in a black lodge
or a white lodge or a black-and-white lodge,
none of which makes eternity look very good
even if birds sing pretty songs and there’s
always music in the air. Is it any wonder
we were deeply confused in what we thought
was happiness or should be? Any wonder
I’m confused now at the depth of joy
and sadness I feel together as I listen
to a dead man’s composition at this desk?
It’s as if there’s something on the edge
or articulation I can’t grasp, something
beyond words floating like notes through a room.
Did you know there’s a version of that theme
with lyrics called “Falling” sung by Julee Cruise?
She’s dead now too. And still alive every time
her voice is heard, you’d almost dare to think.
The music builds so slowly you’re at crescendo
before you realize it, and then you’re falling, falling,
and whether or not it’s in or out of love,
the falling’s all you feel and never ends.
An eternal present of falling, a falling
into which you might surrender, or from which
you might reach out for harbor or the past
to rest a while in stillness. To rest like a body
lying on a rocky beach. Or like an old man
seated forever in a red room or in a dream.
When we picked up the developed photos
from the pharmacy, I saw I’d gotten the angle
all wrong, had lain not on, but across the line
that Laura’s body traced next to that giant log,
making an absurd X across time and space.
I thought I’d ruined everything. And, thank God,
I eventually did. Because now I’m sitting here
and holding a stone that’s lain in the embrace
of a strand of my third wife’s bright red hair
in the darkness of a desk drawer for a decade now.
And I’m listening to some pure, ethereal music
written by a man who’s dead, and I’m not dead,
not now, though falling, as ever, toward that state.
And with a stone in my hand and undead music
in my ears, it feels like I’m somewhere wonderful
and strange beyond all human eyes, where a bird
might cock its head, where machines sharpen themselves
through the night, where the river only knows
how to keep going the same way it’s gone all these years.
Dan Albergotti is the author three full-length collections of poems, most recently Candy (LSU Press, 2024), the inaugural volume of the Sewanee Poetry Series. His work has appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, The Southern Review, The New York Times Magazine, The Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize, and elsewhere. He is also the recipient of fellowships from the Amy Clampitt House and the Guggenheim Foundation. Albergotti lives in Tampa, Florida. You can read more at his LinkTree.
Featured image: Dan Albergotti
