Remembering Mark Steinbeck

Green Afternoon

for Mark Steinbeck

Mark, sorry I didn't want to see The Louvre. 

At 17, What did I know of painting? 

40 miles inland, over the fireplace

we had a Robert Wood seascape,

moon through clouds doubled off a wave regressing, 

the beach now gray glow and hush

while outdoors the orange groves took the beating sun, 

Santa Anas, late April frosts. Art was a kind of denial.

You knew so much from books. You turned last pages,

shut them and went into the world with educated momentum.

I tried to catch up to your Thompson with my Huxley,

you in Escondido, me in Northridge

That acid we dropped in Chapman

fell a long way. The cello played "When You Wish

Upon a Star" just blocks from The Happiest Place on 

Earth. I couldn't believe our luck then, so 

now that it's run out, I'm not surprised.

Still I go around saying your name.

Forgive me for calling you back from the paradise.

When Dorothy scattered your ashes from the stern,

I saw the gray flash green and recognized it:  

our afternoon off Ensenada Grande, the late sun off the 

sandy bottom. I call your name not in denial of death,  

not to fill the empty spaces (there's no such music);

you are not alive on my breath,

just ahead of me. 

                              So when I saw The Louvre,

it was too late to tell you about it. Now I know,

friendship is about going when your friend says, "let's."

For everything we saw in the same space and light,

I say your name and am blessed as so much memory 

regresses, how the images emerge from utterances

letters at a time, the space between two words,

never a full sentence, and no full epistle,

but the kind of denial I keep in the center of home

with the spirits homes are built to hold.

Photograph by Dorothy Steinbeck