Embers stinging the clouds,
soot settling on a line -

black flake rain
is stirring.

Here is a new sleep,
where I find myself.

Laying in the cascade,
the phone's young flood

assembles your hair -
I'm reminded of my flight

across the salt,
to the place where you are.

This city's graved flecks
are forgotten; I've left them

for a green kingdom
in another pattern.

Earhart is static.
In Pacific attics,
searchers hunt smoke,
fold maps, pragmatic.
But the search for fires stoked
with brush is done. She provoked
the upper angels unprepared,
and was broken.
It’s so clear, all the air
over this sea: no twist or glare
blots the view for miles,
though magnetic snares
****** with fields of smiles
the wayward compass, routes
drift from proscribed aisles.
Did she ditch in the blue mute
expanse, flare's salute
a last hope to unwind miles?
Planes get drawn back. It's moot.

Oyster shells of light
peer through the Y
in a bare tree.

Night has moved on
to California or somewhere
out on the ocean.

But the new day, it aches,
the grass drowns in dew.
I see my loved one

in a week, and until then
I am getting a little tired
of clouds burning like sugar.

"We three, we're all alone,
   [...] living in a memory,
   [...] my echo, my shadow and me."


Over in the corner
are your books,
stacked into the wall.
I like to be the mourner,
it seems. Long looks
at your bric-a-brac, at all
the things you left.
The night is perfectly cleft
into darkness and silence.

What else can I do,
but poison myself
with sentiment?

My mother's friend,
bleak-mouthed,
took me to St Matthews
in cinder glory
& kept her eye
on the thin gold leaf
spread across colonies
of saint's faces.

No, I'll never forget
sitting in the blue car
with my mother
when she told me
Eileen's brother
had killed their parents.

Eileen moved
to Bristol
& got married.
She made calls
that rattled my mother,
sent fruitcakes long
distance.

When my father died,
she couldn't stop herself
from insulting him;
my mother forgave.

A year later,
she died swimming -
my mother's mind
leaned back fifty years
& remembered someone.

I...
I remember only
St. Matthews,
the way the windows
below the azure dome
hissed with light,
& how Eileen -
indifferent to religion -
explained the rules
of the candles
for the dead.

We lapped the ice as it came apart,
breathing the thick frost in pieces
that melted in the lung.

We raced. It all caved in
before our eyes, chrome drop,
aching flakes mounted our hair.

Faster, Emily, faster –
loosen the knees that hold flight in them,
as white evening’s fallaway comes.

I quit two miles before. I sat in the car
and watched in wonder as you hit the vanishing point
and became this snow lyric.

The empire of the morning
is falling, falling.

The cold wavers a little,
divides, and collapses in colonies.

The sun feints behind acute corner,
advances west at a bicycle's pace.

Crows wag in the mulch,
scrabbling at petals,

cawing at the noon
that stands any moment.

I sit with the book
you plucked from the air,

joyed by it. I hope you call -
I will shave.

My thoughts of you eclipse
every domain of the hours:

the morning's empire dies, but
a confederacy of afternoon is raised,

& already there is a plot
putting forward a kingdom of night.

Empty dress on hanger's *****-arm
where is your mistress? See that I burn,
stoked by her absence, and burned words
wheel inside me. Dusk's rusting flood  
of lawn where once she stood is only
now a crisp green leaning shadow.
Without her I'm a thousand times tired...

Empty dress with your gauzy charm,
you hang with a ghostly turn
over a vacant ankle. Yet as you're stirred
in the air, hope presses my barking blood,
a spark and spur. Dress, don't be lonely,
she'll be back soon to reclaim us, though
our lives may seem to hang on wires.

Tuesday night and
you've accepted
the proposal, yet
under the chandelier
of mistaken fireflies
you half-smile,

a drawn curtain
that I can read
enough to worry,
to feel
the body
move away.

The rest of the night
is a sharp nerve,
& gray fingers
of a fog slip
down the street,
thin and ashamed.

Some yellow has gone,
bleeding in the valley.

Night lisps forward,
soft as ether,

as blossoms of bay laurel.
The moon stains the east,

& errant glimmers
founder in the cloud ditches.

The trees gather ice,
pages of silence,

smeared with identity.
Let this winter end

with an escape -
let this blood gallop

from black lots filled
with daggers of self.

Move me to
the necklace of river -

away from this inheritance
that stirs the dark.

In Reply to Lori Jones McCaffery

"Poetry Challenge 1: One sentence, 17 syllables"

I'm doing a variation and writing a poem consisting of only 17 syllable lines:

Born with everything possible; how disappointing it came to this,

watching dull rain erode the snow from chilled off-white to curb-frozen ash,

drinking old Ardmore and lamenting an ironic philosophy,

Evan's law - as disposable income rises, so do all the bills.


"Poetry Challenge 2: 10 Words - Time, Place, Emotion"

I was thirty-nine in Washington with a Turkish girl:

I chased my feelings for two years until I found

her in bed with someone else. So, to hell with her:

I'd rather get drunk and watch the snow melt.

Oh, little sweet one -
you found me early, and held on tight.

Hundreds of photos prove in chorus
the joy you took in living.

You would climb to my shoulder,
like a honey-brooch, and perch -

gazing green-eyed out the long pane
at the small traffic below, the playthings

of your curious thought. I cannot bear
to give away your beige tree

so frayed and leafed with hair.
I cannot bear to gaze at the rug

where you delighted in long quiet hours
of happy sleep, dreaming of running,

legs twitching. Your love of tuna,
& endless inquiries into the open freezer door

charmed me anew each morning. Your purr
gathered in little hums and circles in my hands.

We both hated our many moves,
but you always found the best parts

of our new homes so quickly -
the bat-squeaks on the school roof,

or the mourning doves beyond the screen.
I miss the scrape scrape scrape of your foot

in the litter. I miss the little splashes
you made in the water bowl.

I miss you very much, little one;
you were the best part of me.

Save me,
she writes.
Take me
from here,
everyone is
dead, even
I feel dead.

She reads
his messages
in the dark.
"I'll come
for you,
I promise."

She climbs
for hours,
in the castle
of bone.

"But what
do you look
like?" he asks.
Her heart
turns to water
in her chest.
"Show me,
show me
everything."

She's not surprised,
just disappointed.
She turns away
& steps back into
the black lane.

Another Orpheus
fails the test.

God begins to sleep,
even before the sun
pulls its skirts back
behind the tall buildings.

You can tell because
the crumbs of evening
start piling up in the garden
where the pine tree
meets the piano.

Everyone is out
in that final gray hour
that sinks knee by knee.
The door is open,
my nose is sailing
in a sea of sweet basil.

This slavish night,
outlined with anxiety,
running a fever,
claims me again.

My pen's in my hand
and the nib is the child
of heartbreak and distress.

Love, please tell me
where to cast my life -  

The ivoried downtown
and sleeted piers

of Washington,
where the Potomac

sleeps itself blue,
& the rows of museums

pull coffee teeth
in a closed afternoon?

Or the northside quay
& green garden walls

of Dublin, where I walked
in your hand, eyes to brim,

out to Phoenix Park
to search for the fallow deer,

but finding instead
only a debris of wind?

I'm owned by neither:
I wake each day

into a dead space
without color or shape,

only these memories -
do you remember

leaving yoga on
Connecticut Avenue,

the petrichor winding
out the night's full flower,

the nuzzling shine
of the walk?

I don't care
where it happens,

but that's what I want,
every day,

those steps home with you;
every ******* day.

Their eyes slash
like small fish.
I curl away,
ribbon against
the scissor arm.

Forget it, you won't
get blood from a stone.
**** therapists
press their steam.

Tongues hold, even as
words break away.  
Just wait them out, wait
them out, wait them out...

Bold girl's
gold curls?
Cold whorls.

Brunette's
new bet?
Fool's debt.

But dark hair
sparks rare -
marks pair.

Dear,
You're out late tonight -
in evening. I will open
at the moon. I might go away
to howl. Return soon,
Evan

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day
-Lord Byron, "Darkness"


Eater of broken meats
touching the night skin:
an ebb and flow of rain
scolds the window.

My skin bursts with olive slivers
with no hand to calm it in the morning.
Scalpel water from the white basin
glistens on a lip tatter.

The moon is failing.
Crude isolate breath
hums above the bud-elm.
Young drunks are wailing

as they hug one another,
twinned by the street flicker.
I succumb to sleep's disease
with your book still in my hand.

On my eleventh birthday
Dad gave me this book -
The Eyes of the Killer Robot.
Inside the peach cover was
gothic baseball,
malevolent wizardry,
small breath horror, and
magic, cut with 1950s science.

In the book a madman
learns how to extract our eyes
and uses them to power
an evil golem ace.

This morning, twenty-seven years later,
in the pre-Christmas rain
that pools black in the brick
I suddenly wondered
if Dad with his incurable
glaucoma his eye drops
and surgeries, realized he'd given me
a book about the fears of stolen eyesight.

And the son came to know
what the father knew:
the terrible softness
of a trembling eye
under the blooming
steel of the speculum.

An incomplete face
in its glass slab,
pulls a distance over me.
Mournful, I watch the neighbors
streaming down the toothy walk
in black and brown coats,
their laundry massed  
on shoulder tilt,
or in little onion cart.
They are all right here,
in this winter identity.
Washington accepts them.
If they should crane
& launch a coup d'œil
into this hunched pane
they'll know I am not of them;  
what body I have
stalls on this laminate -
the black fume
behind fastened eye
has already bolted
to keels of poetry
across furrowed Atlantic:
completing a glass face.

All things change to fire,
and fire exhausted
falls back into things.
-Heraclitus

Black block grove and glade -
it's all translated to wet geometry

by the patina of the rain slant...
It's like a spell has been laid on this place.

We are those without bedtimes,
the quick pestles of clocks grind

past Friday night into Saturday,
the sky tinted, louched:

greening cloudy wash wringing
opals into the late softened minutes.

Things fall back as they were before:
night dissolves in the cold window hood

until the only dark things left are hands,
unstill under sheets of morning lake.

The green night
draws a little farther in.

I'm feeling it -
Your face in the black glass,
your face over the wine pool,
your face that drifts away
from my reach
in buttons of smoke...

I'm feeling it -
The wallpaper crawls away,
the red chair moves its tongue,
the green night closes.
It's a bad intuition,
a javelin of thought,
that maybe it's less than OK.

Your face shrugs the black glass,
your face escapes the wine pool,
your face keeps drifting away
in glencairns of Longrow,
in pyramids of regret.

I close the windows
against the electric moon
as language pries me open,
as the wallpaper crawls,
& your face won't stop
drifting away.

Des champs de caramel dans vos yeux
la vapeur de la beauté tout autour de vous.
Le foulard de nuit vous enveloppe,
les manches du jour sur le sol.
Ville froide, ville chaude
ville du cœur
vous êtes un citoyen universel.
Je suis votre cartographe,
votre biographe,
votre poète de nuit.
Je présente votre chanson au piano.
Femme caramel
quand ton cœur s’ouvre
c’est moi qui suis là
avec une bouteille de vin
et un cierge.


"Caramel fields in your eyes
the steam of beauty all around you.
The night scarf envelops you,
the sleeves of the day on the ground.
Cold city, hot city
city of the heart
you are a universal citizen.
I am your cartographer,
your biographer,
your poet of the night.
I present your song to the piano.
Caramel woman
when your heart opens
it's me who stands
with a bottle of wine
& a candle."

When my date
stood me up
for late coffee,
the sky poured cloud
& my heart turned
over some blood
with anxious moves.

I was
"as hollow
& empty
as the spaces
between the stars,"
as I sat
& watched
from a hired car.

The street lurched,
& the stoplights
had coins
over their eyes,
twinkling.
If this was
the final ferry
over Styx,
I could hardly
feel more prepared.

The driver
said nothing
as the passing world
degraded down
into some blots
on the backs
of my eyelids.

I'm burning beside you,
trying to quiet
my hurt mouth-sounds.

Get up and search for honey
in the back of the cabinet,
cursing all the while.

Is this one of those
moments when someone
is about to leave me,

gathering their things
& inching toward
the proverbial door?

Go outside - count stars -
have a panic attack -
breathe, breathe -

catch fire and burn.
If I make it to bedtime,
it'll be a mercy.

Mickey and I rounded the house
to an orange pool wrestling
with an aluminum gloam,
deck chairs and log quarters
stacked in the yard spread
against the high house,
Maryland night bent through
the gate rings, and whiskey
seeds come toll.
After twenty beers,
I fell on my side,
retreated enough to throw up
alone, sedate rectangles
over speeding asphalt.
Dazed, I wandered inside
& found the girl
in the water heater room,
pink bra under bare bulb,
feasting on the joists.  
Mickey drove me back.
My sister was on the phone, laughing,
while I sat in the stitch of my room
waiting for an axe handle lullaby.

I was a thin child
playing in the backyard
in February of 1989,
when I was called inside
& readied for the funeral
of my first cousin, once removed.

For many years
I remembered it
being a cicada year.
but my memory was wrong:
1987 was the year
I put my hand to a tree
& accepted a sleeve
of placid red eyes.
I also thought
there were leaves falling,
but that too was wrong:
by February, they were
fine brown powder.

The family gathered at Arlington,
I stood stiff in my good clothes
& remembered him
as best as I could,
alarmed by how sober everyone was,
& by the unending white teeth
of the earth, breaking through
all around me.

After, in the car,
my mother told me
about the accident in 1958
that took 31 years to **** him.
He "lived a kind
of private hell," she said.
At nine, I barely understood,
was terribly shaken.
I thought about it
alone in my room
for decades.

After that funeral
it took years for a death
to move me more than
the cold day when I was driven
to my cousin's body
and his unmoving blood,
which was lowered to a place
where I could not see it.

I walk in wild
liquor combs
of stag grass,
alleys of fat cubes,
all engraved with
a Cinderella moon
that bows out at midnight.
Under it all,
a grease of solitude:
it's just me, and
these things.
I watch one neighbor
collecting delivery
in the upper dusk.
Another falls
to mattress, in
a lonely window
all of yellow.
Lamps fluoresce,
streaming cruelly,
while cigarettes
float in the dark.
Where are you,
in this?
Thousands of miles
in the rain.

This path
from Petworth
to the drowsy metro
is a bite of sun
across cherry branch
into the water head.

Greenleaf ways
& the grass throw
of the hum rails
cross the lefting
memory of a ride
in a salt shadow.

Saturday's breath
is sold to the hill
& in return
I get to keep
the sweet javelin
of her thought.

Here in the waiting room
it's beige and safe.
Nothing like the room
where I'll divide my trauma
into lean little cutlets.

When I can't take it anymore,
I'll watch the fish
living in the doctor's tank,
thoughtlessly ******* down
bright quivers
of lamp stripes.

My hands are crooning,
those old songs of blood, love, and night.

I wrestle the angel on the riverside,
damp wings scraping my face

as I eat the halo whole.
Now I'm adrift, floating in the bone -

airplanes are bleeding white ether
in a lipstick sky, under a crumpled sun.

At midnight I watch the redhead
send glassy broadcasts to her stone flock:

she shoots mr sleek-hair in the attic
of the blue-house on the electric island.

These impressions storm through me...
nothing is narrative, nothing is coherent.

I was wrestling an angel in one moment,
the next my hands were crooning

sandy nocturnes of blood and night.
I lost my job and now I'm flying away.

Frank takes another ****,
& ribbons of condos
emerge from the hills.
He leans into a rustle
of unwrapped rain,
waiting for it to slip off
so he can fly fish again
out at Michael's Mill.
He's been cooling heel
for hours, but he makes
a good point:
the river yields bluegill,
the kitchen table yields
bills come due.

Sheets of fog
scarve the trees
& within
the rain hiss
the dawn
moves ahead.
Apartment buildings
wake on
Connecticut Ave,
& in the valley
an apparition
drapes the forks.

I'm alone after
another breakup
& it's starting
to weigh.
I tell myself
that it's all
in the trying,
but we all
know that lie.

******* it,
just let the fog collapse
back into the grass,
it's tried long enough
to be a cloud.

This morning I watch
knitted clavicles of light
hurtle in and up the wall
in my half-packed
living room, while cubes
of fresh spring hew
strongholds in the
birded birch yard.
But I am ready to leave
all of it for the ruptured
gray weeks, the rain lash,
the fog bars, the burnt sea,
the little tilts of rainbow -
for her - would she have me?

Dad died not far from here.
Now the evening lays a red carpet

of old leaves for me, a wet welcome,
stamped all down the walk.

I think about Dad, and also Her,
the one who slipped her thin words

into the spaces I was saving
for children, or something.

Those words erased me.
Dad's death erased me.

I was rebuilt in a new image,
scrubbed out with the side of Her hand.

So now what? I grew my hair out,
trying for a new look. I am running,

reshaping the whisky fat.
I am a scream. I am a scream,

piercing the black hood of night,
washed away by this new one.

The new one is no answer,
she's been burned the same way.

I visit my oldest friends, boys I knew
in the lunch line, the school yard:

they are full of ancient pain,
cooked into them, no escape.

I'm near the hospital where Dad passed
into the air. Who knows where we go?

The forest closes in. The sky dies.
Houses collapse into bone and mortar.

I am alone tonight, can't you tell?
Where are they all? Where are they all?

Once I would
take a word,
like lake, and
use it to tell you
how I was afraid
of losing you
by hiding in
that word:

"I am under the wall of lake,
pressed thin as parchment
in the inhaling dark,
by the shape of where you were."

So what is there
to find in this poem?
The television's grit
and glow, by which
I mean I sit alone.
The frost in the glass,
by which I mean
I am thinking of you.
The fox in the snow,
by which I mean
I miss you terribly,
& I am not afraid
of saying so.

"Before our lives divide for ever,
While time is with us and hands are free.“
-Algernon Charles Swinburne


There is a strangeness in the air today.
New buds came out on the branch,
green and purple and yellow,
like bruises on old arms.

The sun is gnarled, wrinkled,
folded between ****** clouds
like stringy dough in the knuckles.
The sun doesn't care, it doesn't care

if I'm alive or dead.
It sits in its eight minute perch
in perpetual mockery
of my careful observations.

Someday my dead ash will mock
the fat red belt-bloat of the sun ,
expanded to eat the first couple planets,
maybe even ours.

But no one cares.
If there was ever a lazy, wanton god
who made all this waste,
he or she retreated long ago

to watch these jests from afar.
If there was ever a devil who scourged
the hells with a red hand,
he or she retreated long ago.

Now there are just free hands,
roaming in the salted night
of the inner city boundary.
Free hands can touch what they want.

We are all frozen in time
by our unregenerate desires.
We are free-handed, starry-haired.
We are just lines, wavering.

I arrived at six for an early start,
only to find that a cloud had coughed,

spat, or birthed a fog onto the lawn,
midwifed by polearms of corn

under silver doctor's eyes
of cooling car. Beer tabs snicked

away as a giant cheerful beast
slouched and stalked us

with candy heart and whetted tooth,
snapping at pipe smoke enemies,

patrolling our hands with hope.
Lives roll along, we all find:

men and women having a hard go
of it in hornet houses, or exes

who tent us with doubt even now.
The fog has burned away and the lawless

calligraphy of insects weaves and wreathes
the rising air into which exits are engraved.

Time enough to slide the highways
back into the busy hours

of porcelain hearts - easily chipped
but good enough still for daily use.

You are my music,
on this long Friday.
Colonies of love
rescind the distance.
Your chestnut eye
amid glen and grass.

The scent of fresh grass
is rich as music,
rich as a soft hazel eye
on a sun-stolen Friday.
What distance?
There is only this love,

this cascading love.
No lance of grass
can close the distance,
only the piano's music,
a flight of Fridays,
a caramel eye.

And that Turkish evil eye,
hidden away with love
until that Friday
I tasted the bitter grass
and heard tense music.
And you, in the distance...

What distance?
Your soft brown eye
is here, a type of music,
an immense love
laying in the grass
on a whistling Friday.

It's always a Friday
with long distances
tucked under grass.
Your beckoning eye,
brimming with love,
singing with such music...

Love has no distance -
This Friday I'll make music
in the grass of your eye.

Full fathom five thy father lies
of his bones are coral made
those are pearls that are his eyes
nothing of him that doth fade
but doth suffer a sea-change
into something rich and strange
Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act I, Scene ii


I was a blue baby.
Umbilical noose drawn so close,
a rope of blood. The starving air
never loved me.

Now my father is air,
all of them are in the graves
of the air, the transparencies.
I can only claw at the silence.

Dolmens of rain collapse
in the kitchen. Black coral rises up
out of the fridge, out of the cabinetry,
out of the thickening lung-mass.

I am ever that blue baby,
leasing breath from a sterile hand,
my hair silvered over like a frost -
my tattoos gathered like a frightened flock.

Sea-changes are coming.
My last thoughts today, that coruscate
from the obelisk of my spine, are of the woman
who slurred my atoms so carelessly.

When Dad died
I had this nightmare
of him standing
by the bedside
ten feet tall
at least
trying to say
something
but the air
only congealed
into a
black paste.

A few of
those dreams
& sleep keeps
its distance.
So I go
running,
not to escape it
there is
no escape
it colonizes
the mind,
but to exhaust
the bones
so old Hymnos
can descend
on his one
charred wing,
and mute
the memory
of Dad
in the
hospital bed,
waxy gasps
collecting
in the air.

Tonight
I run west
with the
gale wind
that rubs
against the slate.
Along the
crannied angles
of the money houses
where windows churn
with the cadmium glow
of happy families.

The invisible gale,
the voiceless flat
slabs of slate.

They are sailing
at high tide,
the galleons.
As clouds break
on the pink
evening mantle,
and the wind
purses toward
the waists of trees,
the galleons reef
sails and draw off
into curtains of surf.

That was the day
you told me to meet you
by the split rail fence.
When I got there,
all I found were squares
of black grass
and a moon
as white as a lie.

A gaunt green so full of song:
a lark bunting nests in the holly,

under a marmalade chariot
with Catherine-wheels:

I mean both senses of the word.
Self-lashes leave stripes thin as days.

O, how I move my hands for you,
from pen to wrack, choking away

the sobs, sometimes, because
your city is far from this city;

but other times I run my thumb
across your kitchen scrawl,

across your glassed-in face,
across the things you touched

when the dream was living.
The gaunt blue princess

holly quavers beyond
the trellised net, thronged

with twig now: a little bird
caches its frail life away

from a cat o' nine tails sun
that is whipping & whipping.

I laid there
for hours
and listened
to the rain,
unable to
sleep. It
dropped
in mild
lambent
waves all
down the
grass rail
and across
collars of
trees. The
street was
splotched
with wet
shadow.
Eventually,
I knew that
sleep would
not come for
me, I went
out as you
suggested.
The rain
truckled
down my
knee,
behind
my ear.
I felt it
assemble
on my face.
Standing
in the dark
buttons of
the yard,
I put my
hand on a
corner of
life, and
stood in the
water brow.
Clouds sank
like the
shoulders of
frigates.
I went back,
having
annexed
a dream.

She lies in bed asleep,
while I shed the deep
shade of my birthday.
My sun's low red leap
is her *****-edge moon.
Tonight I sled steep
drifts of draft, palest ale,
while her head sweeps
her day to dream.
Happy hour's dead cheap
but I go home to pack.
My zee's her zed, heaps
of them for her, I hope.
Evan's heart is hers to keep.

Ginevra de' Benci
has a sullen mouth,
a hooded eye, a cheek
that betrays a cerise

blush creeping from
chestnut curls, her face
is petulance and command -
she's secretive as water.

She loves you,
she leaves you,
you'll almost throw
yourself from the window...

Ginevra has cruelty
hooked on her face.
In that frozen glare,
desire and anxiety mix.

What other feelings,
underneath porcelain wash,
were caught mid-blossom,
fixed there forever?

A child's recipe:
two crossed sticks
and yarn
to bind them
hung in the window
to watch
indolently
our blind dreams.

I couldn't have
guessed I would
keep making these,
not with yarn
but barbed wire.
Not with twigs
but bones.
No dreams
but ghosts
that pile up
like snow drifts
against the window.

Gravid clouds dome
the mid-morning

when I'm brought to life,
mouthing your name

like a silk gag
between teeth.

My green-washed skin
dulls in the scrape-light

culled from the flat
of the sky. I'm like

a golem, a mute thing
given rough life,

but who is my maker?
Was it you, lover, who

brushed the breeding
moss from my face,

my lips? Who called
me up from the depths?

Fed me breath, recited
the books of the high air,

until I was yours?
Then why am I so restless?

Will I be cast back
with your fingernail

to the wide quiet pool of ink
where you found me?

The sky refused to break all at once -
rain crumbled over in stubborn little halts

as we stood there, simpletons and gods alike
under the wet and ashen hem that hovered

as if reluctant to descend into our phalanx
of grief. Suits and ties our inadequate shields

against the cold clench at the throat
as the mourning file piled pale flowers

in lieu of words because words, too,
had halted in the air. Trees drew

bruises across the young afternoon,
& the white water tower rose like a giant

trying to understand our forms of death:
how we ringed round the opened earth

& fed our memories to each other
because it salved the worst of the hewn

wounds raw-carved into brains by loss,
& reminded us of what's left, of who we were.