Blank Pages


From letters written long
ago,
the dead cry out, unceasingly,
not for monuments or
manuscripts,
but for love and understanding.
But I, a slave of reveries
and musings,
cannot conjure what they want,
cannot invent what they
deserve.
 
Blank pages whisper words.





Middle-Age Lamentation


A girl ghost
swirls and
curls
coiling herself around me,
as she plumes heavenwards,
like sweet
incense
at the final farewell.
 
Doped up on daydreaming
I feel her, two
and twenty,
lying on my breast.
She whom I once adored
is now a siren
singing
to me to rise with her.
 
But the cold clanging of the Sanctus
bell
breaks this retreat into reverie.
My eyes open, smarting from the
smoke.
She has fled and I see the Host.





October 4th


Like the wandering
Monarch I spied at the end of day,
we aging boys of autumn too slip
away.
 
Brown brittle leaves curled up in death,
float down to earth like
decrepit butterflies
in a dance of decay choreographed by the
wind,
blessed by the smoky incense of a ripened sun.
 
I drink in the
scene, close my eyes
happy as a bee entombed in an apple.
 
Shadow shafts
slice up the ground, the funeral drapery of old:
wordless scrolls of
black preach the passing of all things.
A cool undercurrent in the
October air
gently lowers the light into its nighttime grave.





Supper at the Nursing Home: An Epiphany


The spoon in
his hand is an umbilical cord
from bowl to bowel via mouth and
stomach.
It is a lifeline to the next meal the next day
the next month
the next year the next lifetime.