All We Know

All We Know


And as the balloons touched
down into the sea on that
Sunday night in April –
what then?

What of the thousand buoyant
red and yellow plans you must have held
for your truck-stop in Paranagua?
What of the truckers at the grain port

whom you’d resolved to help?
What of the unnumbered details behind
everything that was so quickly
fading behind the misfortune of that day –

and what of our need for better details
to fill in the mysteries of your death at sea,
a death that has left behind
lines that won’t come to me,
not even faintly

as a cry drifting across the waves
might have come to me
if I’d been out fishing like
someone might have been out fishing
as you struggled

in the company of a dream
neither too big nor too small
but still, at last, the end of you,
awash in unabsolving brine,
asking a fisher of men

to take up the best of you in his nets
as Atlantic cold and current
resolved to carry the rest of you
to where your arms will find their rest
in the completion of the sky.

             for the Rev. Adelir Antonio di Carli
             August 2nd 2008