And tried to revive him
Something about his pallor
Skin cool to the touch
Pupils fixed and dilated
Something about Jersey City Medical Center
Where he was seen immediately
He didn’t have a pulse he wasn’t breathing
On Saturday morning his heart stopped
He never woke up again
He died of cardiac arrest at 6:08
Something about an autopsy
Respectful of Jewish law
To determine the cause of death
Something about finding a funeral home
His body delivered from Newark
And a place to bury him
Something about a ride to the train station
A pledge to the grieving parents
A rabbi to conduct the service
Something about amputating your arm
Because it bothered you
It was never a wing anyway
Something about amputating your leg
Because it hurts
You will never walk away from this
What was done by the twenty-two-year-old
Who took an odorless colorless liquid
On a rainy night in late August
Cannot be undone by the paramedics
Or the doctors or the officers
Working the night shift
What was taken cannot be untaken
By the kid who took a ride out
To Mallory Street in Jersey City
And dropped a cap of GHB
For a long powerless ride to the end
Of a night that would never end
I had never heard of his killer
Synthesized in clandestine labs
And sold for twenty bucks a tab
I had never heard of Liquid Ecstasy
Georgia Home Boy Goop Easy Lay
Grievous Bodily Harm
What made him feel drowsy
And euphoric what relaxed him
Into a kind of stupor
What made him feel affectionate
And sociable what induced nausea
And made it impossible to breathe
What caused a seizure caused a coma
What stopped his heart and left him
Lifeless on the floor
I will never know why it was written
What was taken cannot be untaken
What was done cannot be undone
Like a blind wing turning in the dark
Like a lunatic spark of light
In the thickening clouds
Like a flashlight flickering in the woods
A broken flashlight in the dark
It will never be fixed again
Like a lighthouse on the horizon
An abandoned lighthouse
Its beacon wandering at sea
Like a crescent snuffed out
In a storm over the waves
The drowned moon
It should have been an eagle
Cutting through the fog
It should have been a swallow
I once saw a car careening
Into a streetlamp on the corner
Its headlights crushed
Like the sound of a stone crashing
Into a wall in a deserted neighborhood
It was too late to save the stone or the wall
Like a stone shot out of a slingshot
In the dead of night in the dark
The slingshot could not control the stone
The thunder sounded like a machine gun
In the dark sky it rattled and stopped
The lightning flashed and died
I was asleep at 6:08 on Saturday morning
I did not see the flashing light
I did not hear the roar
It rained for twenty-two years
And two hundred and forty days
All the days and nights of his life
The rain it raineth every day
From the midnight of his birth
To the early morning of his death
A light rain fell across New Orleans
On the day he entered the world
Before the great flood
Torrential rains swelled the Tiber in Rome
And overflowed the bayous in Houston
We once drove across a bridge of rain
Heavy rains pounded the fields
Telephone wires wavered in the wind
His apartment flooded in Massachusetts
He walked through a hallway of water
And stomped into town
The roads were sleek with rain and sleet
But he drove to New York at three a.m.
He skidded home traffic was light
The rain in the city did not deter him
He splashed through the downpour
And bolted the house in a rainstorm
In New York City the rain was constant
For days in Jersey City it never stopped
I can’t bear to think of him in the wet ground
He will come down like rain
Upon the mown grass
As showers that water the earth
Like a swimmer strolling into the ocean
On a breezy day it seems fine
Suddenly the waves start carrying him away
He was always a good swimmer
No need to pay attention to the warning
Flags on a day without lifeguards
Now he can’t get back to shore
Panic begins as a flutter in his legs
And then blasts through his chest
He is fighting against the waves
Riptides drag him down
And swarm him into the underworld
He was somebody’s errant boy
Somebody taught him the crawl stroke
Somebody taught him to respect the water
He stripped off his clothes
And dropped them in a pile on the shore
His last effects
Like a swimmer strolling into the ocean
On an unsuspecting day
No one knew he was out there
Swimming in the rain
The waves got higher and higher
And slashed the shore
He left without a care don’t worry
He was a strong swimmer
But the ocean was stronger
His last fight against the waves
Riptides dragged him down
And swarmed him into the underworld
The stone says nothing
The stone remembers nothing
An ordinary stone
It just sits there coldly in the dirt
By the fence in the cemetery
Doing nothing
All day long all night long
The stone never moves never knows
No one thinks about it
The stone cannot know
No one can forget about it
Because no one knows it is there
We stood at the grave site
Studying the view from the grounds
It’s just far enough from the road
We stood in the low grass
And marched around the trees
And made a final decision
The stone knew nothing about anything
Until someone picked it up
And turned it into a memorial stone
The stone was singled out
It could have been a weapon
Someone could have tossed it
Away without a care
But instead someone picked it up
And laid it gently down
At Section 3 Row R Grave 12
Rest in peace at last hyperactive one
I will stand above you aghast
The Regional Medical Examiner a doctor
Conducted an external examination
Followed by
an autopsy
On the unembalmed refrigerated body
Identified as Gabriel Hirsch
Case #09110776
The body is clad in the following items
T-shirt with a design cut
One pair of boxer shorts cut
Accompanying the body
One multi-colored wallet with a Visa Debit card
One Metro card one Massachusetts driver’s license
The body is of a well-developed well-nourished
Average frame 182 pounds 70 inches
White male
The nose and facial bones are palpably intact
The trachea is in the midline
The torso is unremarkable
There are no injuries
To his upper and lower extremities
His genitalia show a normal circumcised male
Postmortem Changes
There is moderate symmetrical rigor mortis
On the upper and lower extremities neck and jaw
Lividity is pink posterior and fixed
The body is cool
Subsequent to refrigeration
Evidence of Injuries
External and Internal
None
His brain weighed 1530 grams
And had a glistening leptomeninges
The cerebral hemispheres were symmetrical
His heart weighed 380 grams
The left ventricular measured 1.3 cm
And the right measured 0.5 cm thick
His right lung weighed 1000 grams
His left lung weighed 700 grams
The bronchi were slightly hyperemic
His liver weighed 2130 grams
His gallbladder contained 8 ml
Of green viscus bile without stones
His spleen weighed 440 grams
There were no enlarged lymph nodes
The bone marrow was unremarkable
His right kidney weighed 180 grams
His left kidney weighed 190 grams
His bladder contained 250 ml of straw-colored urine
His stomach contained 20 ml of bloody fluid
His vermiform appendix was present
His small and large intestines were unremarkable
Specimens were submitted for histologic evaluation
Specimens were submitted for toxicological evaluation
There was no postmortem radiology
Sexual assault kit was made and prepared
DNA card prepared pulled scalp hair and fingerprints
Were taken and retained on file
Special consideration for autopsy was done
Without water all utensils and preparation were made
To remove and provide all blood or fluids back to the body
He loved twisting rides on roller coasters
Coins fell from his pockets
When he was upside down
He loved tossing quarters into claw games
The noisy clang of slot machines
The soft light of casinos
He loved Nickel City in Northbrook
Twenty games for a buck he played
Four hundred games in an hour
I sat at the bar drinking a Diet Coke
And reading Apollinaire while he hurtled
From game to game in Dave & Buster’s
He did not like family vacations in Wisconsin
That trip to Puerto Rico was a disaster
Thanksgiving in Texas did not elicit thanks
He loved Six Flags and Sea World
At Disneyworld he met the Ninja Turtles
I once took him to a Power Rangers concert
It surprised me how much he loved
Retracing Columbus’s journey to the New World
On a high school field trip
He adored cruising back into Rome
And he condescended to me
Because I’d never been to Lisbon
He loved absinthe he said he drank it once
In Europe it tasted decadent
Like a girl who smelled of licorice and smoke
He loved the way the Mediterranean
Spread out and spanned the centuries
He loved to walk through the ruins
He loved his 2000 green Acura Integra
Which he drove at high speeds
On deserted roads and winding highways
He loved pretending he could play the hi-hat
And crash cymbal like Travis Barker
The tattooed drummer for Blink-182
He loved the metal bands we heard
On Randall’s Island in 2006
Disturbed Atreyu and Bad Acid Trip
He never gave up watching Dragon Ball Z
Pokémon and Rocko’s Modern Life
He loved the moment in The Boondock Saints
When Murphy says we’re sorta like 7-Eleven
We’re not always doing business
But we’re always open
He thought Massachusetts and Connecticut
Were boring states there was nothing
To do there he loved New York City
Something was always going on
He loved the Yankees and the Giants
He hated the Red Sox and the Patriots
He loved strong coffee specialty beers
Tamar’s oatmeal cookies California burgers
Spicy Thai Indian and Mexican food
Dogs were his natural friends
He bet all his money on the long shot
At the racetrack he won big a couple of times
He loved his twenty-second birthday
Above all others it was the night of nights
Night of celebration
Gabe was my best friend
Gabe was my right-hand man
Gabe was my wingman
I could tell you a lot of stories
I wrote them down we did everything
Together I think I’ll drop it
And tell you what it felt like
To be with Gabe
On his twenty-second birthday
We went to a tattoo parlor
To watch an Ultimate Fighting match
On pay-per-view
We pooled four hundred bucks
And bet it on the underdog Cain Velasquez
Gabe said his head looks like a brick
We needed him to beat the UFC heavyweight champ
Brock Lesnar the baddest man on the planet
I once saw him pulverize a guy
I was nervous because everyone was shouting
About the killer in the octagon
And everything was on the line
But Gabe just gave me that little smirk
Of his you know the one I mean
It said we got this
That night we won big
We won really big
We pocketed eight hundred bucks
We danced on the tables
While others drank themselves under them
We painted the town red
We bounced over to a club downtown
It was so crowded no one was getting in
But Gabe convinced the doorman
We were part of the wedding party
Just like in the movie Wedding Crashers
It was an after-party for a Chinese wedding
Gabe kept telling everyone
We were distant relatives of the bride and groom
We were just wearing our regular clothes
Jeans and t-shirts but Gabe was insistent
He had a baby face people wanted to believe him
Even when they knew he was lying
But once we got inside the party
The Chinese girls could barely speak English
And so we couldn’t talk to them
We picked up Pepi too at the end of the night
We jumped on the backs of some monster
Garbage trucks to hitch a ride
The garbage men chased after us with
baseball bats
But they were too fat to catch us
I can still hear them wheezing after us
We ended up at Union Square at dawn
Gabe headed off with his last forty bucks
Where are you going I told him
That’s your last cash why don’t you
Save some of it for tomorrow but he said
We’ve just had the night of our lives
And these homeless guys deserve a good breakfast
He bought two pies and twenty-four donuts
And handed them out to the homeless men in Union Square
When I’m standing in line at the DMV
And the stoner next to me
Starts ranting about his parole officer
The dude has anger management issues
He’s profiling me I couldn’t get there
Because my grandmother was sick
When his buddy rolls into Big Nic’s wearing
Cargo shorts and an Oscar the Grouch t-shirt
And I slip him a fifty-dollar bill
When one of his goofball friends swears
He will never take hard drugs again
And then drops three tabs of acid
And winds up in an institution in Tennessee
When I recite Surprised by joy
Impatient as the Wind
And think about Wordsworth’s daughter Catherine
His six-year-old son Thomas his daughter Dora
Whose death caused him to quit
When someone’s nephew someone’s
Brother’s oldest son a drunken teenager
Gets stuck on the railroad tracks
When I see fresh-faced soldiers
Hurrying off the plane in Atlanta
And everyone begins to clap
When the truck swerves into my lane
When lightning strikes a tree
While I am walking across a field
When the young anesthesiologist
Puts a needle into my arm
And I start to go under
My friends studied him in high school
As the inventor of Polish poetry
A sixteenth-century humanist
Who translated the psalms into rhymed verse