Elegy for Ira Abraham Hartzler

Elegy for Ira Abraham Hartzler

I

The way Proust’s bread stood atop gothic church steeples,
the old man knelt, his brow to his palm, and broke the loaf
of black bread,
the painting that complimented it, imaginary, hidden away
in an Amish household,
showing the red wine, Christ’s blood, the elixir of life,
symbol of your lifeblood – wife you missed miserably.
Saw you dead in my imagination at New Wilmington Hospital,
cringed at your emaciated silk body, pale brow, open-mouth.

Saw you alive on a green velvet sofa chair.
Never ran a mile in your life,
but you walked a million miles in one step,
your heels drained of fluid – strong.
Clung to your house, surviving centuries of
glacial scraping – the ice thawed and left
rhododendron outside your Mennonite temple.
Thought of the mitral valve prolapse you inherited
generations before, leaving you craving sweet air,
the afflictions birthed in your grandson’s heart,
faulty valve death-pang chest pain appearing once in a while.

Thought of your quiet mind that could tune out all the noise –
you heard well.
Thought of the teal doors on Amish farms indicating the presence of a virgin –
could find that color on your favorite flannel shirt
in iridescent waves.
Determined that we were meant to stay on ground-level,
not heights of Samson pillars – they rose in fainting awe
to heaven’s cusp,
where insulin shots eased your bride’s Scotch-Irish pain.

You cried at the noise banquet, they threw roses,
and crowned you with “World’s Greatest Poppa” t-shirt and cap.
Remembered your delirium – you talked with phantoms,
fearing what we all fear, the world fading away, the air dropping
from your back-brain, eyes rolling skyward –
an ecstatic mortification of the senses.
Wrote your elegy upon the birthday of William F. Buckley.
I would ask “Where were you when the Titanic sank?”,
when you sat, plush verdant youth, in green vegetables and oatmeal, hanging gardens in Volant shade.


II

Come back to Route 794 and bury my body
below a riffle of water from McMichael’s Creek,
where souls hover as rising oxygen, and sinking hydrogen,
on stream froths – I smell brine from washed out ocean sand collecting low-flow in the mid-Spring night.

Received a report that you were in terminal restlessness.
Received a report about your talent reciting poetry –
do not worry, I’ll return your Henry Wadsworth Longfellow collection, and your American poetry anthology,
I stole them from your house in Volant when I visited last.

Received a report on the process of dying –
I had my own version of death –
each day you lose more control over your body.
Listen to your body, you can hear it speaking to you –
don’t given in to its absurd demands sometimes.

Come back to Route 794, the highway that looks like Pocono
Raceway – it has claimed so many souls and car parts,
enough to reconstruct an entire vehicle –
they litter the roadside like parts of the human anatomy.

Your practicing nurse, your granddaughter, your daughter
(who sat closest), sat nearby, the distracting breath
of the oxygen machine reverberated through Shenango Home,
and through Poppa’s lungs, and passing through his spirit,
its natural emollient – you exhaled lavender’s sweet breath,
floated on the pool’s surface, everything submerged but eyes,
ears, nose, mouth, and were in tranquility awed by
the blue-blankness and peace in the sky.

This void, eerie, aching your heart, wonderful.
In ecstacy, you waited for the right moment to rise
in jeweled water, lit up in isolation,
gentle cotton brushing your cheek
on a rainforest canopy in paradise.