1.
Once a year, one by one,
they take a single candle’s solitary flame,
down to the lake’s quiet shore and
set it adrift in the small boat of the heart.
It is a ceremony for the souls of the departed.
It is about the other side,
but it is not happening there,
on the other side,
it is happening here, on this side, now.
And it is not candles, it is not souls
drifting away on the enormous, endless water.
It is the ones who married the wrong person,
burnt the roast, fed us, and set us adrift,
who spilled spaghetti on their good clothes
and laughed and died and left us.
2.
The day when Thomas Merton
stepped out of the bathtub,
wet and naked and
touched the fan and died,
the day Jesus said “It is finished.”
I think of when the birds are so still
they might not be there and
you’re not yet aware it is quiet,
that they are not there.
Or maybe like the freeze frame,
there, but stilled, while in motion.
Or perhaps a prison, kind of sad alive,
a there with no other there.
Maybe after the ending breath we’ll be
rewarded for finally cleaning our plate,
be given that importance inside silence,
perhaps a kind of room or field to wait in, to meet.
3
Virgil Davis died yesterday, sudden.
Thirty eight years old, a big six-foot
something, employed, mostly happy,
black hair, family, etc. Wasn’t
AIDS, muscular dystrophy, cancer,
some decent lava disease.
It was death. Killed him.
No disguise, flyers, nothing even
about being in the neighborhood.
Just came right up, said,
“Leave it all, everyone, now.”
4.
Doris Farmer was thinner
when I came to call.
The broth and peas were
cold and still in the
bowls by the bed. “They
said six months but
I feel weaker by the day.”
After a while her
dogs, a blond one and
a dark brown one,
walked alongside me
to my car with
their happy tails. I drove
down the street
to where a school bus
was waiting, its
long red arm held out
to the side that
said, “Stop.” Two small
girls and then
a little boy stepped
down onto the
big road and crossed the
street, empty lunch
pails in their small hands.
5
The great giant boat,
moving slow through the starry dark
moving slow through the north Atlantic night
moving slow to the waiting edge of ice.
Then the jarring tear like God groaning
from the furnace in the Earth’s core
that shaped the swift terrible knowing
to form the final cast of the mind.
The unbelievable water is immense,
the great boat tips upward--
T-I-T-A-N and half of an I can be seen--
then slides down backward
fast, like a decision,
into the black ocean, and then
only the voices of the drowning dying,
rising together and utterly separate
in an immense terrible chorus,
rising and falling from the floating heads,
lifting up to the thousand silent stars,
to the small receding lifeboats
where the living are leaving.
And the heads, one by one, disappear,
the cries diminish and shrink into the growing stillness
as each slips two miles down to
settle and lie near the great giant boat,
6
In St. Louis, Missouri,
one week after the dead girl is found in the park,
a forty-seven-year old Chinese man
is being lowered into the back seat of the police car,
his hands handcuffed behind him.
His face is without feeling.
"I just wanted her to be quiet," he says.
"I told her to be quiet."
7
The wet fingers found a pelvic bone
and it frightened them.
They found it in the bathtub,
it belonged to them.
Now loose skin moves
over the knuckle of bone
like it was something separate,
never intending to stay.
The wrinkles say
we will follow time,
leave bone behind,
be afraid, then not.
8
Maybe it’s a small thing,
like light that leaks out under the door.
Maybe you’re just lifted up out of formation
like geese with new orders.
Maybe the world shudders,
the horizontal flickers,
senses, all senses, fade.
The night, the dark light appears.
The soul’s curved play comes into sight.
9
She is not mad at you.--She does not want to hurt you.
You are not in her way.--She is not going to put you
in a room alone, forever.
It is not about your dead friend’s blue
tennis shoe you keep on your dresser.
It is not about the struggle for Europe,
the cruel posse chasing the poor werewolf up the mountain.
You are a sweetening of her desire,
a fondness she has that is inexhaustible,
to remove your tight shoe.
10
A child in America,
a small boy three and one half years of age
turns his head hurriedly to follow the darting dragonfly.
It is bright crimson and yellow and blue.
He has never seen such a bright yellow,
such a sharp blue.
He does not think about them.
He does not think yet.
He only sees that yellow and blue can fly.
He does not know they are yellow and blue.
He does not know yet.
He lets them undo him.
"Good taste is the death of art." Truman Capote
Sunday, July 1, 2007
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