I discovered this poem while I was in prison. I don’t remember exactly where I found it, but I remember how deeply it resonated with me. Reading it again, years later, it still does.
When I was in college, I was drawn to the existentialist writers, particularly the notion that “existence precedes essence, ” that we become who we are through the choices we make.
Buckley’s poem brought me back to those ideas. It was a sobering realization while serving a prison sentence, confronting the consequences of my own choices.
To Luis Omar Salinas in Oblivion
Christopher Buckley
We bet high and slept in the streets,
sure the sky was holding something back,
drove late down Wishon to the market
you christened Filthy Foods, finished with
the iron ore of despair. We had a fistful
of Ones to buy chicherones and a cheap 12-pack
of beer to keep us company under the bare arms
of the apricot where we found fault in the heavens,
2 bits left to toss into the bucket of fate. . . .
With our compadre’s collie dog we howled
at a moon rising from the black gullet of space,
put on our souls, buttoned our coats, and,
as your metaphors flared like meteors
across the forehead of the night, we took turns
transcribing them with a ballpoint by the light
of twigs burning in the grill—text, subtext, ash,
salt of a life streaming away.
Amigo, now
I have a savings account that won’t save me
from anything. I have 15 fountain pens
and not much time to use them before
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow calls to me
from the forest primeval. There’s no trouble
left for me to get into anymore. We’re dying
tonight of everything—no alibi for the missing
laces in my shoes, my shirt without a sleeve
of hope, the dust leaking from my cuffs.
And even if I shout the 7 syllables of your name
into the dark all I can see are the scrambled
backbones of the Milky Way . . . I might as well
go on down the sidewalk, wondering where,
if anywhere, we’re headed, as it becomes clear
that nothing’s written in the stars.
Originally published in Cider Press Review, Volume 24, Issue 1, April 2022.
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