Last Will and Lament
for Quin Eli

I refuse to compose your elegy
until you’re dead. I’m trying not to think about
all the poems I will write after
it happens, after you are gone, how I will go on
without you, writing poems,
or if I will let all the words drain out of me and
into the ground, let them burn
with you. I wonder what I will tell people when
I quit. Maybe I will look down
and say “oh, it just wasn’t for me anymore.” Or:
“I don’t have the time. I am so
busy.” It is true that I will be very busy, because
living without you will be hard
work, so hard that I will be capable of very little
outside of waking in the morning
and staying awake until I fall asleep again. I am
tired already. Maybe that’s what 
I’ll say: “I’m tired. I can’t write poetry anymore
because I am just so very tired.”
I will be good at obfuscating by then. I will have
to be, in order to hide the scream
living permanently in my throat. It will take time,
I know, to learn to speak without
screaming. That’s okay. It will keep me busy. It
will keep me distracted, keep me 
from joining you, keep my promises. I won’t tell
them about you, not yet. I won’t
tell them about the hitch in your breath when you
laugh, about your lewd tattoos or
the way your hair flops into your eyes, about how
when I think about you my heart
beats harder, faster, almost painfully, with fear and
the other thing. I won’t tell them
the details, trading poems in the emergency ward,
the way the nasal cannula traces
the line of your cheekbone. I won’t tell them any
of that. Remember, by then I’ll be
skilled in obfuscation. I’ll say: “I met someone.”
I’ll say: “I’m in love. It’s serious.”