Free Man Gone Down by Michael Thomas

we start.” When we sang “Jerusalem,” I couldn’t help but think we were each the last of our lines.
    Smith Street is empty except for the ghosts and the moon and one woman who walks toward me unaware, phone to her ear, talking loudly. She’s buzzed and mocking someone on the other end about her choice in men. Ten feet away she finally sees me. She readjusts the phone. She smiles. “Hey,” she says, as though we know each other. “Nothing,” she says into the phone. “Just someone outside here. I’m walking home.”
    A car passes and Marley floats from the open windows—
“No, woman, no cry”
—more ghosts. I scroll through things in my head. Memories. Images out of sync with song. “We die with the dying: / See, they depart, and we go with them. / We are born with the dead: / See, they return, and bring us with them.” My father, not dead, but toothless and struggling for language. Struggling, perhaps, even for the force, the feeling, the idea, that drives the word. When her grandfather lay in bed in the ICU dying so far from England, so far from anything that was familiar to him, the last thing he saw was my face. His breaths were slowing. He looked at me. He closed his eyes and clutched the gurney rail as though summoning the strength to battle the guardians of memory. He sang: “In the middle of the ocean there grows a green tree . . .” He cried one tear—spare and poignant and easy to miss. He inhaled sharply—a whooshing vortex sound markinghis emersion into history—drawing him in as though his words went first, then thought, then memory. The ninety-year stoic, how had he managed to hold on to even that much—weeping—lost nobility or nobility revealed? He died without exhaling.
    I remember my mother, not dying, but always—her fear. I remember how lost her up-south drawl sounded. I remember her slaps, ice cubes and liquor, her stories: the orphaned children in Virginia—the half- and quarter-breeds—the unrecognizable human mélange: the line of Ham; the line of Brown. I was the one who’d given Claire the poem, because she didn’t know what to say.
    The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration. A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments.
    And so in blessings, and so in song, and so in bottles and beatings. And so in absence and death, they pass themselves on to me, like they were torches ablaze but now seemingly without heat, without light—perhaps only a history of fire—a symbol of that which was once warm and bright and useful. My mother, ashes in the urn waiting to be spread.
    And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well . . .
    I think that I would like to leave this world with a song and a tear—that I would’ve held just enough in reserve to still have one of each, that there will be someone there to listen and watch and they in turn will whisper their secret affections—but there’s no way to be noble anymore. Perhaps there never was.
“I will be true to the girl who loves me
. . .” There are echoes of ditties unsung, therefore promises unmade. The green tree. The yew tree. The grassy hills of England. The tarmac of Brooklyn. A concession of love, a casualty of failure,disappearing down the maw of a vacant avenue, reft of language, left with memory. A phantom who leaves no legacy, only haunting, marring who you loved and who once loved you, chilling those you are near. I shudder on the avenue. What if nothing lies beneath my spasm, my stomach’s descent? What if there are no ghosts in Brooklyn, and my love’s cheeks are unspeakable and all gone?
    When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
    The big broken clock hiccups the hour. There’s really no choice in the matter.
    I will