Elegy for Uncle Ron
Jennifer Tubbs
Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest 2024 (view all the winners)
Honorable Mention, Tom Howard, Poetry
You of the acid-blue Palm Springs skies, you Warhol Soup Can collector,
you star-spangled tax evader, making America bankrupt again,
you UFO-abduction believer, zapped up into one of those intergalactic,
metallic wombs during a drug-swathed segment of the seventies,
survived by no one, which is to say everyone, let me tell you what I believe:
Moon-sliver struck, citronella-smeared, sundrunk, earthworm-new,
under an overpass on I-75, I womb myself to the surface. This body is no
bright instrument. This body is (they all are) swallow throatsong seeping
dawn hungry minnows darting along lake scrim thumb and index finger
nexus where a knife sits, waiting for a car to stop for anyone at all to reach
out their hand. Perhaps you understand this loneliness, the way I grieve for a woman
and what could have sustained us all our lives,
because of all those years no one believed the starpeople communed with you
above that long stretch of desert highway. As the soft citrus rinds of over-
ripe grapefruits rotting on the branch in your yard, I taste bitter. When you told
me you had hoped AIDS would have killed all the gays in the eighties,
I sat still in the sweet crease of the Coachella Valley next to you and thought
of my lover and her galaxy of sunspots, thought I love you,
uncle, aunt, milky white flesh between pink meat and orange peel, thought
I can love the light in all things, which is to say everything. Bless you,
uncle, and your cosmic travelers, little grey men—always men—who showed you
the stars. As for me, I believe death is a fallacy, that this body is no bright
instrument, that if you put your fingers inside me, there is a gentle give, and I give
gladly of myself until this body (as they all are) is a bright pink star
under an overpass on I-75, where my lover died, thrumming swallow-soft
with the downy whir of cars above as below, and I have taken this long to fish
out the words to say what I came here to say, have worked hard to pluck out all
the glimmering things thrashing inside to tell you This is what God is—
loving right down to the rind.
