For David Foster Wallace
(After Henry Taylor)

What brings us to the surface this time? The stories
of another writer who has been paid to stand before
some pool of graduates on the brink of the real world?

Maybe we see a friend’s travel pictures posted on Facebook.
Whatever it is, you who know him get to relive the old joke
again: swimming until we forget that we are swimming,

until he finds us again, reaches down and pulls us
from the pool, flicking the solo cups from our hands
and says, Listen: the airwaves fluctuate, constantly alive

with laughing, crying, squeals of newborns, another
ebbing nation in the Middle East. The writer tries
to cue us in, like a conductor subtly raising his baton

to the string section. We are reminded of the year,
month, day that he himself walked off the very stage
he illumed for us, and try desperately to eulogize him

through our own poetic devices. It means nothing.
We are still struggling through the maps of his psyche
with each re-read of texts he left, in hopes of pulling ourselves

from the labyrinths of our own stories. So we ruminate
amidst the soft buzz coming from the Harbinger as a friend
hands us another beer, and this voice stammers in our ears

again that it is what we were born into: to recognize,
to remind one another what it means to be alive, to be alive,
to be alive. Strange, how all it took was one parable

to expel the breath from our lungs, to push us upward.
Or maybe it was just the extenuating circumstances
of another themed college party—dead authors, let’s say.

But we pass the days for what they are, whether we know it
or not, adjusting the epics of our heroes. Then again,
we were drinking. God knows what we heard.