One Day with Mortality


The river in which we swam . . .    
                                                functioned well;
        it coursed around us, bubbled, eddied, broke;
        an earnest river, not in the slightest diverted, 
        not even a bit whimsical or skeptical, not interested 
        in us, nor in those molecules, stable, 
        indifferent, and imperishable, that made it wet.  
        Just like us swimmers, the river was a 
        convenient fiction more useful than 
        all the indivisible, insoluble facts 
        without which we are unfitted to live.

The grass on which we lay . . .
                                              was beaten flat 
        like metal under a ball peen hammer 
        wielded by a loving hand that weighs the 
        value of both material and tool.  
        In it perdured the tiny cosmos over which 
        we hovered like gods, the Insect World.  
        We watched as tropisms bred knightly feats 
        of daring and sacrifice that shamed us 
        as we grew up and away, towering 
        above finite loves, astride broken faiths.

The day which we spent . . .
                                          was memorable 
        yet is not truly remembered.  It has 
        lost itself and cannot be (any  more 
        than that which once panted in a 
        squashed raccoon on a road you were driven 
        down by your grandpa who sought a field 
        he recollected but that wasn’t there) 
        recalled.  We recall, but not the day, 
        nor what we did.  Melancholy, to think 
        we recall only our recollections.

Our words . . . 
                      are become less than the graffiti 
        of Petra, the curses diligently 
        carved at Carthage, the runes scraped coarsely 
        in Armagh; except that, uttered once, 
        our plosive, plotting language flies by 
        black magic, without shape or mass, like the 
        earthly state called colloidal suspension, 
        like smoke rings that bluely hover near, 
        then slowly swell to fill our solitary 
        rooms with insubstantial snakes.

Ourselves . . . 
                      have been dozens of times 
        reiterated like those immemorial 
        jungles that in their tangled deaths stored energy.  
        Compressed like thick springs, our pasts tighten 
        inside us.  We are warped and woven with the 
        rubber bands and bits of lint that time stashes 
        in a pocket’s bottom. Thrown over, our 
        old garments, reeking pitiably of comfort 
        and tobacco, will be forced from us 
        with our hair and with our biting teeth. 





Falling Leaves


The maples began tumbling in October,
magnolias next; now, with the oaks, it’s done.
Happiness, say the Chinese, is when the
grandfather dies, the father, then the son.