Requiem For Gregory
by Larry Sorkin
We need to speak of him, he was
our millennial cypress: root,
trunk and storied leaves, now
our storm felled
hero on the other
side who can’t
come back even
as a vision—that’s what death might
as well say: in the cloud
covered sky over
the lake or the sky
we find staring
into it: he’s gone. So
tell the many
stories anyway, or just
the one his brother Bennett tells—that,
on this shore, men
hunkered on rough
hewn planks between
a bonfire and lapping
water and a questioning
sky with the silence this
man carried better than
any of us, this
Gregory, who played the flute.