The Second Day
Midnight passes on the road behind you &, hours back, the blinking fireflies. Overhead the new light kindles the wings of each plane ascending, then leans forward, illuminates the high green branches & sees everything: the fear you thought buried, the countless words toward penance & the flowers, one after the next, waiting for the doors of their memory to reopen. When it was done you tried twice to close the dog’s eyes. You wanted something easier. Don’t we all? But you imagined it could be gentler, how the cat moves in no hurry home, feet coated with the darkness of the earth. In a year like water falling to stone, the diamond cuts a place for you to sit & watch the day, a bead of sweat building until it slides down the glass. Now that light burns two, maybe three minutes away. Then a few minutes more.
If Beauty Matters
Today, the one before we say goodbye, something extraordinary climbs from the chrysalis & it’s the childlike hills that choose me, not some other memory. Distracted, I’m forever that boy in the face of my father’s machine for injury, a second machine for apology, equal both in their necessity &, of course, unfair. As though I wasn’t almost thirty when you & I met, wispy somersaults above the ashtray, elbows & wagging tail in the last light of the fire escape. To this day, I wonder how such spirits might linger. By any means &, after these long months of utter darkness, like the pageant of our favorite summers together.
In the Doldrums of Summer
Once more I leave the dream, carry my glass downstairs & too late break the thread the spider makes. The final minutes of spring went painlessly (barely noticed) & the late, swirling hemisphere threatens to lay down its ageless, electric roots before moving elsewhere. My boy says he’s afraid he’ll forget me when I’m gone. Clean, cleanly, like Novocain & our family dentist retired last May. I clamp & hold as if around a feather, the fear in every wing that lifts & drags. I clack & floss to spite my knee, the cranky back, the beasts in each of us sown. That one there with sprinkles, we sometimes say to no one in particular. Soon enough the sun obliterates the rooflines & houses & still I believe it’s their memory that keeps the darkness from growing back.
Straight as the Crow Flies
At the mausoleum, before stepping out into the latest sorrow, we gather teams of bowlers from the first names of the dead. We knock-knockity-knock-knock and listen at several crypts. Downhill, across where we used to spot a cow or two on Sunday drives, the steady climb of the radio towers, red on white on red. Together they stand like sisters, identical, & pay no mind the ladybug nor the roses that’ve lost their pinks. Far from home, hanging our hats, we find a ladder without beginning or end & climb. Its light could pass for a star & the birdbath, should we need, stares dry & overlaid with the slight, downy seeds. We cannot retract what was or wasn’t said, cannot return to help the curled man alone in bed & farther south, those thin, lissome layers of fog or else the woods are aflame, truly on fire & it’s time to run.
