Elegy with Matchbox Bus and Andromeda
            -for the seven dead in Atlanta, March 2007

Jeff Gundy

I.
To get there I drove two hours through rain and storm to Detroit,
waited in the crowds to get on the plane, waited on the plane and flew
through thunder, everything bumpy and slow, got in two hours late.

I sighed and wondered why me. But at the conference hotel I found
my friends and we hugged and ate and drank and laughed as we do.
In the morning Clint and I had eggs over easy at a greasy spoon,

and the waiter brought huge glasses of warm orange juice, bacon
I didn’t want and hash browns mushed up with onion and pepper,
too many to eat. Back in the book room somebody told me: a bus

had crashed, some were dead, right here, my school. So sorry, they said.
Off the overpass it went, like a Matchbox bus full of tender breakables.
How can it be. All day I was in the wrong place no matter where I was.

All day I didn’t watch the news. Everybody in Phoenix and St. Petersburg
knew more than I did, saw the players speak with their arms in slings,
carrry their scrapes and gashes like maps drawn by somebody both mean

and stupid. All day it was not at all about me. I didn’t even try to go
to the hospitals. All day people I barely know kept offering comfort.
I said thank you, felt lucky and guilty. The parents flew in stunned

or weeping. The duffel bags were taken off for cleaning, some soaked
in diesel, some jumbled with the parts of those vanished sons.
I imagined being the driver, and maybe four seconds too late

to brake it all into a minor flub, a story to tell around the table.
So much for the carpool lane. So much for making omelets. Too much
to do and not to do.When I finally found the group, I asked a father

if he thought they’d play any games. He said maybe next year.

II.
It was later, deep in my private night, when I learned another secret.
We found the strangers in the road to the park, in the road, in a hollow 
with a metal room and a man inside, surly and unspeaking, and below

another room, children, a woman. Were they a colony, an outpost,
spies? They looked unremarkable but they were other, no mistaking.
They offered nothing, they had purposes they didn’t mean to share,

when we threatened they chanted God will help us, God will help us,
as if they had a direct line. We demanded explanations, we worried,
mighty words were whispered: M31, Andromeda. Impossible of course,

a galaxy far far away, ridiculous, and yet in the grip of my fear
I hurried out to study the stars. They told me nothing, just glittered
as always, hot and distant and cold. Calling M31, I said into the night:

Come on out. Forgive us. Tell us how you know that God will help you.
There’s room for us all in the park along the river, beside the sweet willows.
We can sit in our lawn chairs in the muggy dusk, sip on our cokes