The Yale Review

1 2 2 Y A F T E R S O M E Y E A R S D O N B O G E N The mind is an impermanent place, isn’t it, but it looks to permanence. – Thom Gunn I like to remember him among a city crowd, that jagged, dazzling flow outside of o≈ces and sealed, oblivious cars. He’d plunge into the stream, a part of it, his eye alive to each detail, the body trim and quick, good boots to hit the street – then home, where he would read like a grad student. He kept a certain edge of tension when we’d meet: a touch of the young man, his mind on other things, ready to take o√ fast if conversation dulled. I miss that sense of risk. Its spikiness stood out against the normal blur of comfortable, safe talk. Nothing safe appealed to him – he’d slip away. But once his will had seized 1 2 3 R on something worth his full attention, he could be relentless in pursuit. A line just slightly o√, an argument unresolved, a capsule that might hone the eyes all night or drop the mind into a dank oubliette – he’d keep up with it, keep on holding what held him, wrestling with the god he’d chosen to take on. I see him walking home, starting to sort the loot he’s gathered from the night, working it, looking right into it, as fog pearls with morning sun. It’s not hard to imagine a version of that same tenacity in bars: within the jostling flux, the heart set to the beat, the body testing itself over and over in time, all its fine bold moves accustomed to surprise, reliable and firm. How long could it have held? I can’t picture the months he stared into the dark, watching each man’s slow fall: loss of strength, weight, sight, then beds and breathing tubes. In sheeted rooms he felt the ceaseless hook of hope and bleak routine of care. 1 2 4 B O G E N Y A letter brought it home: My time of grief is done, all my friends are dead. How to reply to that? I couldn’t then, and still find myself shifting to easier memories. Like Cole Street, where love held a whole household: their kitchen schedule, work and gifts each gave in turn – a boisterous group, I’d say, to use a word he liked – a table up for hours with laughter and wild talk, the view out over roofs, and drawings along the hall that led to separate rooms, in one of which he died. It saddens me to think he shut his door on them. If his strength of will betrayed him in the end – quick promise of the drug sealed across his face, the muscles’ vibrant jolt, the heart stuck in its track – could that be called a choice? I’ll never answer that. What I want, I know, is some transcendent note, one defining scene rendering him at last into an ordered past, which he would hate. His face stares at me from a sketch, a map of red-brown lines, A F T E R S O M E Y E A R S 1 2 5 R fading, intricate. Things change, feelings too, even about the dead. Nothing will be fixed, nothing set. ...