Books & Poems > The Road to the River Blocked

The Road to the River Blocked

I heard the owl scream and the crickets cry.
Did not you speak?
Macbeth

The rough X drawn above HARRISON REACH
(Report 2, see Attachment 3, L 10)
marks where the JFK Fire Boat dragged
completely dressed advanced state of decomp
John Doe then placed you in a wastebasket
and cut the chain around your chest—this freed,
as noted on Page 2, the cinder blocks.
Detective H took photos, G bagged coins
found in your pants, while N wrote up the scene.
At 1530 the Essex ME
made her pronouncement. Eighteen years have passed
and chain-link cuts off access to the bank.
NO TRESPASSING warn skull-and-crossboned signs.
I kick the fence. A guard dog barks and barks.

This fence, unforeseen, keeps me from where they laid
human remains while they began their search
for who you were, the way you died, and when.
Please understand how all those years I told myself
you were still waiting at that spot
and when I got there you’d explain the chains,
locks, bridge, river, and torn into several pieces
Medicare card. The list of disconnected facts,
like filings beneath a magnet made of sense,
would settle in neat lines of narrative:
event 13 from ‘86 fit locks
or night in ’45 jump right to torn.
What’s missing from the PM could come out—
I just had to stand on X, you just had to speak.

Lucky for me: your X, because you floated
mid-Passaic, crossed town and county lines.
Their four reports tell same tale, different parts.
I piece together the two-month-long job
of naming cause of death and if foul play
played any part. They quizzed Castillo—he
prescribed your meds—and Ellen from your LKA,
which housed low-income patients. Last,
Detective N sat at his desk and read
his narrative to us—known family.
Although we had a lot of things to say
we had no words of yours that might explain.
The case was soon x’d closed. Eighteen years passed
before we found three notes in your effects.

Not much to go on. Three handwritten notes.
Unstained by coffee. Never sent. Not really
suicide notes. Written some time before.
Responses to unknown-to-me events.
One to our parents—here called Sam & Joan—
and one to each of two brothers. Three please
accept my apologies (for unspecified
disturbances in roles of son, housemate,
employee of our brother’s painting business).
Three promises to improve my behavior if
I return home. Three hope you understand,
sincerely, Joseph Lamphier—which
sounds like too formal a way to end notes meant
to patch things up after a family fight.

Let’s say you had a fight with Brother K
who bitched about the crap piled in your room
and demanded that you fix things now, his way.
You rambled on about the rights of man.
The dispute traveled downstairs to the kitchen
where Sam, whose short fuse welcomed any match,
joined in and tagged you nut case, son-of-bitch,
disgrace to family and wished you out.
Then Brother V showed up, spat his two cents—
his customers complained about your smell.
Joan clutched her beads and came to your defense
(you needed a nap, a piece of fruit, or tea).
Yet don’t be fooled, it may not mean a thing,
my version of this could-have-happened scene.

That scene was someone else’s, let’s take one
of mine: on Christmas Eve in ‘82,
locked ward in Meadowview. You don’t want me
to see your room. You warn don’t come again.
I bring a brown-bag full of gifts from Mom—
wool socks, new underwear, a flannel shirt,
and half-a-dozen navel oranges
which you pick up but quickly throw back down.
How’re things? Good. You chain smoke Camels lit
by matches I possess and, per Nurse T,
patients can’t have. While others mutter and pace,
you act as if we’re sitting in Mom’s kitchen.
The door near-shut I turn around and see
you tearing apart an orange with your teeth.

Trying to tear apart their open-and-shut
C.O.D.: drowning, Manner: suicide
has brought me to this broken-bottle lot.
Attachment 3 insists the riverbank
bends north one-sixteenth of white space past fence;
exact location of recovery
fixed there, not close enough for me to see,
and after all these years the road—unbroken,
no-name line on map—used by the cops
responding to body found floating ends
too soon. No sign of other ways back in.
Dear Joe, what now? I learned three notes and four
reports and my remembered-you, by heart,
and still your X remains unreachable.