The Swimmer: For Rodney Smith

So I’m hearing, Rodney, that your saxophone lost a friend.
Your flute is young, if I may mention to be put aside.
They say you sucked air like a fish when the tide came in:
What did you want?

To wail, raise a warning shout, set your voice on heights,
on heights in the middle of heights,
on Hoover Dam, on rock that is added to rock
and sand to sand?
The way you lay tenor on bass,
the way a chipmunk dwells alongside the white lights of L.A.
in this spell of rock as terrible, 
as dark as now death is: like the ocean smooth.

I try to talk of you, your ties to Malcolm, but come back to rock,
seek crevices in the wall where no toes can fit, try to follow your voice 
—not because of choice; have no skill and no discipline for it;
find my muscles cramp 
and my breath comes too short to sustain it,
fall and sob with hurt—and not because water tempts me.
I begin to learn a man is a creature of wants and, of all, a friend
is not something he sheds like a skin
or like a ledge jumps off.
                                                Talking on, talking on in installments…

Is there no escape?  No wood a man can catch his wind on?
It does not make sense to keep mixing these landscapes with lives;
they have different tides, different tones, different voices, different grasses;
different paths to know and moves that are different to get there:
you swim; I climb.

You eat glass and breathe glass and drink it. You sleep in glass
and pass through it with easy motions.
Perhaps you think in notions as clear and precise.
I burn like brass in a landscape that is brass with a sameness that infects the sun,
that makes of the dam a dial, of its face a clock, of the rocks that stand guard
            above it
an extended pile of brass and tailings the sun has mined.

I stand here. I burn like a beacon on a shoal of rock among mountains that leap
and valleys that revert to plains.
I strain to climb and find that I, too, am an island,
a single mind that strikes out any direction that a line is tossed.