#MIDDLEBURY
from “Bildungsroman”
Malachi Black
i.m. Scott David Campbell (1982-2012)
Streetlights were our stars,
hanging from the midnight
in a planetary arc
above each empty ShopRite
parking lot – spreading
steam-bright
through the neon dark –
buzzing like ghost locusts,
trembling in the chrome
trance of an electrical charge
nested in each exoskeleton –
pulling, pooling
a single syllable of light
from the long braid
of the powerlines
sighing above us as we climbed
through bedroom windows
with our hair combed
and our high-tops carefully untied –
as we clung to vinyl siding,
as we crawled
crablike across rooftops, edging
toe-first toward the gutters
so as not to rouse
the dogs – as we crept down
onto cold drainpipes
through the lightning
in our lungs, leaping at last
into our shadows and at last
onto the lawn,
landing as if in genuflection
to the afterhours fog –
fluorescent
as the breath we left
beside us on the train tracks
as we walked
each toward the others,
toward the barebulb
glow of stardust
on the dumpsters
in the vacant late-night, lost
About this poem
“‘Bildungsroman’ is a work of communal elegy. This excerpt is dedicated to the memory of Scott Campbell, my friend, co-conspirator and classmate of twelve years, who was found dead in his car of a drug overdose several months before his thirtieth birthday.” – Malachi Black
About Malachi Black
Malachi Black is the author of the “Storm Toward Morning” (Copper Canyon Press, 2014). He teaches at the University of San Diego and lives in San Diego.
The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, whose aim is to make poetry available to a wider audience. Email The Academy at poem-a-day@poets.org.
(c) 2016 Malachi Black. Originally published by the Academy of American Poets, www.poets.org Distributed by King Features Syndicate.
