He made me feel like I was part of something
in a way I’d never felt before and have not felt
since. Part of a community.
I close my eyes and can see a red apple,
but not a community.
I picture that word on a billboard,
myself climbing up
and putting “our” before “community.”
It was our community because of him:
Our grass, shrubbery, trees, our corners,
windows, and doors. Never his,
always ours because “ours” was his goal.
We were his goal, each individual.
Never a command, always a suggestion:
Be yourself,
as, in his acts of kindness, he transformed
I into we, me into an us we owned.
The walls and floors and doors
of our community. The podiums
from which, when he said one name,
all others knew that person,
what they did, what they liked,
and didn’t like. So many people,
our public selves, each part of the whole
because of him.
What I have today, the roof over my head,
the food on my table, I have because of him.
Many of us can say that.
“I made me, he made me who I am,”
Somewhere, each says, as I say.
I close my eyes and see a black horse
in a green pasture,
but not a paradox. The I-made-me-
he-made-me contradiction was part
of the ordinary that lay within our lives,
beneath our hands as we opened
and closed doors, some with plates
in which were engraved our names,
and one door with his name,
that was his door and ours.
And is and will be.
I close my eyes and see us, seated
in tiers in an auditorium. Steve
is on the stage at the podium, and he is
seated in the center, two places at once.