Death has left its imprint on me so much I
don’t know who is touching me inside anymore.

Certainly it’s another presence,
a voice apart from God.

Or is God the sum total of
all my known deaths?

My soul is an oarless canoe
afloat a lake of tears

seeking both initiation
and response to steer it.

Every death is almost next to me
entered gradually,  disappeared,

not gone. Internalized.  
Just almost next to me-

done being themselves,
but not being part of me.

Sometimes the separation,
the loneliness is so extreme

that I am moved
by almost everything,

the body of life not
touching against me,

just moving the canoe
along.

Because I can not bury my father in the sky
I burn him and spread his ashes on the ground.

He loved birds yet did not feed them crumbs—
just  caught them in the color of their being.

He would watch the mower plow the field,
watch the hand fill  the feeders with seed

feeling the tranquility of the man-made pond
drift towards him as he pulled the blanket from

his chin and felt the breeze ruffle his baldness,
the bed as high to the trees as a house allows—

all the doors open to the day
                                  the night

the house receiving guest after guest,
the tables inside-outside spread for feasts,

until the last smoke of him singes my nostrils
settles in my lungs (this strange son of his),

floats above the branches into every nest,
leaving behind the clock spring in the fire

this nonparent of the future, this fruit
of his, leaving no seeds of his own.

I don’t get the feminine luxury of being
twenty-five  again every birthday past fifty.
For a year I must live with the snide joke  that
my actual age is a congress of crows position
illustrated in the karma sutra  (page 69).
Biologically I feel ten years older.  
Facially I look fifteen years younger.  
Every year there will be a different  joke
for the new number and another birthday.
But they say age is just a number .
You just  live with  the joke until
that final one comes up.

I thank life
by living
by praying

in stitches in the
midst of evergreens
aggravates- water

This crippled world
my every payer
of me— of you

It’s simple- how to live, that is:
live and die each day.

Strive to live each morning
as if it was the first:

pull the colors around you
to something that lives
beyond the eyes.  

Treat the world not as Adam:
something to be touched,
named, collected, defined—

but as Eve:
the sun as an ingenue
something young, innocent
not to be defiled but protected.

Live each night as
if it were your last:

set the table for the next
person who eats after you

clear the roar of your mind,
shroud the alarm clock,
deaden the tablet of light,
glance out the window and
see the light beyond the dark.

and before you take that long sleep
praise every surface,  
baptize every living thing.

It wasn’t a river  
just a pool,
more of a hotub,
set off from the sanctuary—
and when I was eased
into  the water
I didn’t see God
in the streams above.

And I didn’t see her
lost in the thunder
of the racetrack
just beyond the church.

She was beyond
my line of sight,
soaking up congratulations
from the congregation.

The pastor gave me
a gentle pat on my back,
shook my hand, three times,
handed me a towel
and welcomed me to the flock.

I was just another sinner saved
and left to go his own way,
certain in the faith
that God will provide.

She said she would meet
me back at her place
after the potluck.

I wrang the towel
of every last drop
and  handed it
back to her.

I walked back to
my old white Civic,
turned it over
and felt the
cool Jesus breeze
of the A/C hit my face.

The voice inside
told me to do the
first thing I heard
on the radio.

I heard Ray Charles
in his blindness
croon to me:

“Hit the road Jack
and don't you come back
No more, no more, no more, no more.

Hit the road Jack
and don't you come back
No more.”

I am married to this earth,
this field, this silence,
even as the ocean offers itself.

I walk  it with my dog on his leash
pulling restlessly ahead,
biting at the frenzy scent trail
he knows exists in the air.

The woods beyond are gray.
So is the sky.  

I hear— the echo of
a  trickling brook.  
My dog, inhales—
the last traces of  
dying greens, the odors
of tantalizing blues yielding
to the coming season.

The horizon reels away
until my eyes can no longer
take it in and the sky matches
the coming night—
contains itself in the field,
in every thing.  

Drops of rain splash
and  fall off my nose
onto my tongue.
The taste is bittersweet.
The scent, silences  
my dog’s barking
with the promise of petrichor.

The hidden brook silently turning
breathes in the renourishment—
the earth, the field,
praise the distant blessing
of a dying Hurricane Debby
bequeathing its last bits
for this life.

In my *******,
I feel the grace
of an unseen promise.
In the walk back home,
I am aware that each
foot thud is full of mud—
the marriage of ocean and land.