Closet Suffocation

So you got what you wanted after all,
no one had to scrape you out of your burning Dodge.
You were spared the tubes in your pickled liver.
Instead, a strong black veteran angel
swooped you in his arms below the green board
where you'd fallen parsing a sentence,
removed the false palate no one knew about 
as why you had always talked funny,
and heaved hot male life through you
for thirty futile minutes.

You had to be really gone, for that would have brought
you back if anything could have.

The priest couldn't, not after your years
of scorning the Holy Ghost.
The campus doctor said you were not a student,
so he refused even to try.
And your widow dared not,
exercising herself to forget
her twenty-year seniority and the silence
the two of you'd kept for nine months
since learning you could neither 
live the divorce nor speak between the rooms.
So too your professors out West forgot you'd stopped
studying Old English and had given up
on the terminal degree.
Three dozen truckers along the interstate
never really expected you always to be available
with a fifth in a rented room with plastic flowers.
A thousand ex-students continued to desensitize
themselves to their disagreement and unclear reference
which you meticulously had remarked.
A California poet mourned you wouldn't be around
to review his latest book.
A Georgia poet was glad that you would no longer
knock over his motorcycle in a huff.
Some majors got your examination copies
and your nieces took the other books

for mere decoration that you'd devoured.
I kept as a bookmark the requiem cards
your half-sisters had made in Nebraska
and learned to live with the truth
that basically the world took your big secret
as no big news and went on about its business
with no sense of loss that another quean was dead.
Louie Crew