Elegy for Lloyd
a poem
Jerry and Tally were showered in roses on their final skate of the Loyd Center rink surrounded by a heart-swollen audience. They cut through the ice tender hand in hand, the way they always have. When I first moved to Portland, I took refuge in the mall on the morning of a flight home for a funeral, I paced the white halls for hours and sat on the spiral staircase to space out, I didn't know what to wear. I bought the wrong thing to say goodbye to a friend three thousand miles away, for a while in silence I watched skaters circle the rink until it was time to depart for the airport. There is now a funeral for that building and I am on the wrong side of the country again; soon it will be rubble and abatement between orange cones and yellow cautions and I will be pacing a different mall's corridors in a different city equally considerd home, still reminiscing over the hours spent between Sears and Marshalls, but at least I know all the miles I carved into the carpets, all the nights waiting for the MAX down across the way, the quiet of my lonely steps is now trampled by a crowd that is dancing and singing a dozen in track jackets from the 80s a dozen in full velour santa suits another dozen in matching T-shirts another dozen still holding out for good news, there will be caramel corn stuck to sneakers for weeks and the marching band will wail louder than my nostalgia ever could, it'd write a phonebook, thick with closed small businesses I once loved, each has surprised, stung, stunned; the shockwave just forces my smile open and empty when it's one thirty acre lot chained off for good.