Medium

In the nineteenth century,

I’d have found a medium,

a knocking table, a crystal ball,

but to conjure him in 2016

I go online and Google,

scroll page after page until

his name disappears

in a list of random links,

but still there’s his handle on Skype,

still the picture of him crossing the finish line

of the Portland marathon,

still the smiling-in-the-wind-on-the-beach photo, still

that e-mail that arrived at 3 a.m.

back in February, those words of such

love and affirmation out of the blue

that I knew were strange but didn’t query,

thought maybe he’d been up drinking,

was feeling sentimental, and

that must have been

the night of the first attempt

we found written in his journal,

how he’d thrown himself off a bridge

into the cold dirty Willamette

but survived,

and how disappointed

he must have felt then,

the body involuntarily countering

with a surge of adrenaline,

his body feeling at its

utmost alive.