The smuggler of Siberian furs                                                                waited in lineat the airport check-in desk                                                           coolly checking his watchin the spy story I was writingfor a magazine you’d probably never heard of.                                                                                                  But that was ok.+The smuggler had just                                                 stilettoed a young poetwho had come across evidence of his crimes,                                                                                                  and nowhe had to get out of Novosibirsk,                                                                       had to meet one of his contactsin Italy               who he hoped would put him up until—+and suddenly I was thinking of you,                                                                              how this was exactly the kind of storyyou hated,                      all that intricate set-up and suspenseleading, inevitably, to                                              the predictable gondola chasethrough the canals of Venice,                                                                how you’d roll your eyesat the whole thing+                                       then tell me, why don’t you write something real,why don’t you write a poem?                                                              You’re good at that.And there’s some dignityin a poem, some reaching                                                        after truthand not just artifice, not just these stupid three-actspy capers                      you could write in your sleep,+and I was already objecting                                                           when I reminded myselfthat you were, in fact,                                               dead. I had watched yougrow skeletal                             and cancerous.The last time I saw you                                                 at an outdoor coffee shopin an Albuquerque outlet mall,you had sipped at your Diet Coke,then asked me to name one poetof our generation who would last                                                                        a thousand years.When I gave you a name,+                                                       by God,you pulled her latest bookout of your ragged tote bag                                                          and said, for once, I agree,and the sun glittered on your glasses and sunburnt                                                                                                               bald headand you slapped that book down between us.That’s immortality, you said, that’s real poetry.+Now you are altogether elsewhere,is what I was thinking, there at my desk,looking out the window                                                    at the snow slivering through the nightand one lone man                                       bundled upand silhouetted by streetlampstrundling through the snowy street toward a stoplight+and on my computer’s screen, that smugglerwas still at the check-in desk.                                                                He glanced around.Two children playing on a broken baggage cart.                                                                                                       A boredpolice officer looking at his phone.                                                                           All he had to dowas get out of Siberia,                                                all he had to do was buy a ticketto anywhere                           with cash—+three acts, as you said,                                                ending with the inevitableshoot-out                     that would bring him down, his bloodpinking that hot Venetian canal,                                                                      a bag of cashlanguishing forever                                           in a locker at the train station.And you,+                     dead five years now. How I miss you,sometimes.                          The screen glowed. Snow fell and fell,so the parked cars looked                                                       larger than they were.Here is a poem for you.                                                You were dyingwhen I saw you last,                                          and now, like all the dead,you are               a kind of fiction.