On Hearing That a Friend Has Attained a Position of Influence in the East (for RS)

How fortunate
the riders arrived
just in time,
silhouetted against the pink sky
as they closed the gap.

What a stroke of luck
the signatures remained legible
when every other word
was streaked
with our unreadable tears.

But if proof were not demanded
so much the better,
these bus locker keys
the ragged index
of our faces
slipping on the cobblestones
as we land face up
in each others arms.

In the shielded cities of limestone
such paper cuts
are public policy,
so how fortunate it was
that our full immersion
in their stagnant waterparks
protected us from their ravines
full of hungry ghosts,
rattling and flapping
the torn bunting of their suits,
gnawing at their watchbands,

or Wendigo himself, barely crawling--
but what a good thing he did--
out of Erin's bonfire
during the harmonic convergence,
the end of ironic Elvis
immediately
preceding the end of history--
Scheider snowballing Prochnow
in "The Fourth War", the green cigar
of Chavalas, Donald Sutherland's
Christ, the apotheosis
of Don Rickles---

So what great good luck it was
that the tanks arrived
before I was forced
to invoke the holy turbines,
the hoodoos of Airdrie,
or the famous last night
when the place that never closed
closed, the Lux
the Marine Club, the Pofi
Bar...

sending us blinking
into the silty membrane
of a mackeral spring shower.