Letter from the Plague to My Dead Friend

Today in my garden the kiss of death tastes of delirium and dirt.  
You must be teaching me everything that rises, portends falling. 

You must be touching my memory of that afternoon 
you piloted us into sky, grinning as we broke from the runway, 

wobbled up over hills marked with animal tracks, over rivers 
and farmland grids, out toward the sea with its buttons and graves. 

Maybe I had to go this far without you to feel the rustle of blue 
hospital gowns travel out as a breeze. 

Maybe I had to ride down to the creek this morning 
to know you are the trout I caught and scale and devoured, 

and you are the net and lure and line I throw out each night
into sleep, only to be tugged awake by the world I love 

as it is branded by the world I hate. So often I kneel there
at the dark seam you made in the cemetery.  Even now, 

at dusk’s appointed hour, after another day in quarantine, 
we stand on our porches and howl, disembodied voices 

in a wild call and response, summoning our living and dead.  
Because we need each other. Because in that plane you rented 

years ago, do you remember how the lurch up, the dive down, 
made the air visible? And when the tower asked, How many ?, 

you answered, Two souls aboard, and mine rose up in me
as if buckled into exhilaration and, for the first time, felt counted.

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Julia B. Levine’s awards for her work include the Northern California Book Award in Poetry for Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight, (LSU press, 2014), and first prizes in the 2019 Bellevue Literary Review, 2019 Public Poetry Awards, and 2018 Tiferet Poetry Prize. Her fifth collection, Ordinary Psalms, will be published in 2021 from LSU press. She lives and works in Davis, California.