Authors: Edward Hirsch
I startled awake in the morning
I woke up and he was missing
We kept calling his phone
It went straight to voicemail
This is Gabe leave a message
We called 311
We called 911 every day
The police refused to help us
We begged them to help they refused
Because he wasn’t under sixteen or over sixty-five
He didn’t have a life-threatening illness
They said that epilepsy doesn’t count
It’s not that dangerous
They had never heard of his disorder
This happens a lot with twenty-two-year-olds
They said he was probably just hanging out
With the wrong crowd
He hadn’t been arrested he wasn’t
In the hospitals we thought
Maybe he was stranded somewhere
And couldn’t get home
The trains had stopped running
Maybe he had spent all his money
And couldn’t call us his phone
Needed to be charged
This is Gabe leave a message
We said he had never disappeared before
We said he always called home
We said he had a developmental disorder
It didn’t matter his disabilities
Were not on the list
And so the police refused to help us
He never liked it when things closed
It gave him the feeling of being locked
In a room with bars on the windows
He never liked it when the weather
Interfered with plans he hadn’t made yet
He was never too sick to go out
When he was ten years old I had to drag him
Out of the swimming pool in a deluge
He wanted to cannonball off the diving board
He wanted to stop and slash some golf balls
He wanted to soap up the wet car
And let the sky wash it down
I remember the morning we escaped
From Galveston just before the hurricane
We coasted in front of the destruction
One night I came out of a restaurant
In a light rain and started to drive home
But the storm dropped so suddenly
I turned out of the driveway
Into a waist-high wall of water
And floated the car to the side of the road
I sloshed home through the flood
It took over an hour Gabriel shouted
That car is dead in the water
I thought I was the sort of person
Who could get pummeled by a storm
And stagger home to laugh about it
Forget about the 468 subway stations
Wind shut down the Staten Island Ferry
The bridges and tunnels were closed
I couldn’t sleep I never could sleep
I just stared out the window
Into the blankest space
Not thinking exactly
Worrying obsessively
Waiting for daylight
I left the house at five thirty a.m.
And wandered past the drunks
Sprawled out on Flatbush Avenue
I crossed the Manhattan Bridge
Hooded with blue shadows
The first bicyclists of the morning
I picked my way through Chinatown
Thick with fruit stands
And born-again commuters
I steered my way up Bowery
Sliding from Skid Row
Into respectability
I moved past Canal and Delancey
The New Museum the Bowery Poetry Club
The Bowery Mission Cooper Union
I saw people buying coffee from trucks
And ordering breakfast in diners
Exactly as if nothing had happened
Who cares I ended up at my desk
In an office building in midtown
Wondering what I was going to do
All day the subways were running again
The city presumed normal
My son still missing
Joe thought that Gabriel was shacked up
With a Brazilian woman he’d met
A couple of times in TriBeCa
He didn’t know her name he just called her
Brazil
all their friends did he said
He had only been to her pad
Two or three times he could remember it
Because it was next door to a club
Maybe on Worth or White Street
We found it after a couple of tries
She lived on the second floor
With a recording studio in the front
We rang the buzzer
For every apartment in the building
No one was home in the early evening
We decided to go across the street
To sit on a stoop and stake out
Five floors of empty apartments
They looked comatose in the looming dark
Suddenly the streetlamp across the way
Began to flicker on and off
It’s a sign
Joe said
I hope it doesn’t
Go out
he was very agitated
It’s just a streetlamp
I told him
The light wavered for a moment
And then flicked off for good
I don’t know where Gabe is
Joe said despondently
he’s lost
And that’s when he knew
His friend’s life had been extinguished
Gabriel made his last phone call
To a number in Jersey City
Janet and I decided to go there
It was just a subway ride away
We were probably wasting our time
But why not do something else to find him
We took a train ride and a cab
To the West District Precinct
On Communipaw Avenue
We marched up to the desk
And told our story to the clerk
Who requested our driver’s licenses
We sat on cheap chairs in the lobby
And wondered what we were doing
In a cruddy police station in Jersey City
We waited for twenty minutes
For forty-five minutes an hour passed
Why had we decided to go there
The sergeant is investigating it
We were told to keep waiting
What else could we do
We had been waiting for four days
We had a disease no one wanted
To help us it could never be cured
Four men came out to talk to us
And we followed them up the stairs
Into an office where one of them said
We have some bad news for you
Your son Gabriel has passed away
We’re sorry for your loss
Something about Craig’s List
Alcohol a drug called GHB
Someone called an ambulance
Something about emergency technicians
Who hooked him up to an IV
And tried to revive him
Something about his pallor
Skin cool to the touch
Pupils fixed and dilated
Something about Jersey City Medical Center
Where he was seen immediately
He didn’t have a pulse he wasn’t breathing
On Saturday morning his heart stopped
He never woke up again
He died of cardiac arrest at 6:08
Something about an autopsy
Respectful of Jewish law
To determine the cause of death
Something about finding a funeral home
His body delivered from Newark
And a place to bury him
Something about a ride to the train station
A pledge to the grieving parents
A rabbi to conduct the service
Something about amputating your arm
Because it bothered you
It was never a wing anyway
Something about amputating your leg
Because it hurts
You will never walk away from this
What was done by the twenty-two-year-old
Who took an odorless colorless liquid
On a rainy night in late August
Cannot be undone by the paramedics
Or the doctors or the officers
Working the night shift
What was taken cannot be untaken
By the kid who took a ride out
To Mallory Street in Jersey City
And dropped a cap of GHB
For a long powerless ride to the end
Of a night that would never end
I had never heard of his killer
Synthesized in clandestine labs
And sold for twenty bucks a tab
I had never heard of
Liquid Ecstasy
Georgia Home Boy Goop Easy Lay
Grievous Bodily Harm
What made him feel drowsy
And euphoric what relaxed him
Into a kind of stupor
What made him feel affectionate
And sociable what induced nausea
And made it impossible to breathe
What caused a seizure caused a coma
What stopped his heart and left him
Lifeless on the floor
I will never know why it was written
What was taken cannot be untaken
What was done cannot be undone
Like a blind wing turning in the dark
Like a lunatic spark of light
In the thickening clouds
Like a flashlight flickering in the woods
A broken flashlight in the dark
It will never be fixed again
Like a lighthouse on the horizon
An abandoned lighthouse
Its beacon wandering at sea
Like a crescent snuffed out
In a storm over the waves
The drowned moon
It should have been an eagle
Cutting through the fog
It should have been a swallow
I once saw a car careening
Into a streetlamp on the corner
Its headlights crushed
Like the sound of a stone crashing
Into a wall in a deserted neighborhood
It was too late to save the stone or the wall
Like a stone shot out of a slingshot
In the dead of night in the dark
The slingshot could not control the stone
The thunder sounded like a machine gun
In the dark sky it rattled and stopped
The lightning flashed and died
I was asleep at 6:08 on Saturday morning
I did not see the flashing light
I did not hear the roar
It rained for twenty-two years
And two hundred and forty days
All the days and nights of his life
The rain it raineth every day
From the midnight of his birth
To the early morning of his death
A light rain fell across New Orleans
On the day he entered the world
Before the great flood
Torrential rains swelled the Tiber in Rome
And overflowed the bayous in Houston
We once drove across a bridge of rain
Heavy rains pounded the fields
Of central Virginia the roads of Connecticut
Telephone wires wavered in the wind
His apartment flooded in Massachusetts
He walked through a hallway of water
And stomped into town
The roads were sleek with rain and sleet
But he drove to New York at three a.m.
He skidded home traffic was light
The rain in the city did not deter him
He splashed through the downpour
And bolted the house in a rainstorm
In New York City the rain was constant
For days in Jersey City it never stopped
I can’t bear to think of him in the wet ground
He will come down like rain
Upon the mown grass
As showers that water the earth
Like a swimmer strolling into the ocean
On a breezy day it seems fine
Suddenly the waves start carrying him away
He was always a good swimmer
No need to pay attention to the warning
Flags on a day without lifeguards
Now he can’t get back to shore
Panic begins as a flutter in his legs
And then blasts through his chest
He is fighting against the waves
Riptides drag him down
And swarm him into the underworld
He was somebody’s errant boy
Somebody taught him the crawl stroke
Somebody taught him to respect the water
He stripped off his clothes
And dropped them in a pile on the shore
His last effects
Like a swimmer strolling into the ocean
On an unsuspecting day
No one knew he was out there
Swimming in the rain
The waves got higher and higher
And slashed the shore
He left without a care don’t worry
He was a strong swimmer
But the ocean was stronger
His last fight against the waves
Riptides dragged him down
And swarmed him into the underworld
The stone says nothing
The stone remembers nothing
An ordinary stone
It just sits there coldly in the dirt
By the fence in the cemetery
Doing nothing
All day long all night long
The stone never moves never knows
No one thinks about it
The stone cannot know
No one can forget about it
Because no one knows it is there
We stood at the grave site
Studying the view from the grounds
It’s just far enough from the road
We stood in the low grass
And marched around the trees
And made a final decision
The stone knew nothing about anything
Until someone picked it up
And turned it into a memorial stone
The stone was singled out
It could have been a weapon
Someone could have tossed it
Away without a care
But instead someone picked it up
And laid it gently down
At Section 3 Row R Grave 12
Rest in peace at last hyperactive one
I will stand above you aghast
The Regional Medical Examiner a doctor
Conducted an external examination
Followed by an autopsy
On the unembalmed refrigerated body
Identified as Gabriel Hirsch
Case #09110776
The body is clad in the following items
T-shirt with a design cut
One pair of boxer shorts cut
Accompanying the body
One multi-colored wallet with a Visa Debit card