for Okla Elliott
Of course I would hear it here
first, or rather experience it
the way we now experience
the weather, the way detail
after detail accretes, providing
eventually a consensus of rain,
in spring, on an afternoon
sidewalk. We knew everything
about you, or so you seemed
to want us to think. We knew
about Bernie and the Pope
and Heidegger and dour,
underappreciated German poets
and your love of Russian soulfulness
and teaching and tacos. We saw
you juggle for your nieces.
You made me want to juggle, too,
if only for myself. What follows
now is not exactly silence but
rather static, a kind of vacant hum.
By quanta or bits or pixels, by any
messenger of the data toward
which we all finally aspire, go
now, Okla, energetically to your rest.
Born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee, and educated at Dartmouth College and Columbia University, Arne Weingart lives in Chicago with his wife, Karen, where he is the principal of a graphic design firm specializing in identity and wayfinding. Recent poems have been published in Arts & Letters, Beecher’s Magazine, Coal Hill Review, Enizagam, Nimrod, Oberon, Plume, RHINO, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, The Georgetown Review, The Massachusetts Review, and The Spoon River Poetry Review. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and his book, Levitation For Agnostics, winner of the 2014 New American Press Poetry Prize, was released in February, 2016.
http://arne-weingart.squarespace.com/