Elegy for Matthew Shepard
© Wendell Ricketts, 1998, 2003. All rights reserved.
First appeared in New Millennium Writings, 4(2), (Winter 1999-2000), p. 87.

In the end, let me believe this much: that only the first blow was
painful—what came after, no more than half-heard thunder, a
proselyte storm impending in Wyoming distances and speaking
in tones as low as a lover’s voice in the floating time before sleep. 

That the scarecrow night and a day on the buck fence were
nothing to him, who had carried himself to a place beyond
the hours, the thirty-degree freeze, the ropes that lashed
his arms apart in the unnatural opposite of embrace. 

That God stood by to witness his ninth hour—a miracle this time
of presence—so that the broken-hearted question never came, and
sent the blank, dark face of midnight down to press its cheek
on his, still wet with tears, and come away all etched in stars.

Anyone who loved him would convince himself the same—
even those, not father or brother, lover or friend, whose
grief, its ragged fingers impotent as wind-ripped prayer flags,
loiters at the boundaries of our skin like shadows.

His silence now is pure rebuff. Wandering away on the indifferent
air, he slipped across the seam that sometimes opens where the earth
and sky brush edges, and, like strangers, step politely back, eager
now to kiss the boy whose reckless arms have stretched, since dawn,

from the far edge of the meadow. He won’t turn back,
though we call, though we stand in groups as general as wildflowers
and bow and nod together in the wind:

He knows the calendar is all subjunctive now, that
death’s no matter for the dead.