The lightness of paper
soft enough to crumble
to a chirping palm ball
released into the air,
an imagined perfect pitch,  
too gossamer to float
to its ultimate arch,
unfolding in the web  
of alluring sunshine

aspiring to be
in its unfolding angles
a thread of silk
caught into the patterns
of a spun handkerchief,
flapping finely down to dirt,
flagging to human desires,
a reverse puff tucked black
into a left back corner pocket.

In its extending it is
****** wood pulp
culled and hewn
from rings of fine pine,
rising in its descent
to barely glimpsed evolving
beaks, talons, feathers
caught in the spider’s web
and shook down by thundering axe.

I collect the death masks
of everyone I see,
many ready with their
mouths turned to  the earth,
eyes closed tight in hellish denial.

Except for L’Inconnue de la Siene
pulled from the river in utter peace,
lovely as Ophelia floating in the reeds,
the resuci Anne of two centuries
of death and resurrected respirations.

Her I grant the heaven she envisioned,
rescue her from the sterile pummel
of kisses and mechanical resurrections
for the body forever remembers its debt
to the devil’s dance of an aspiring life.

I am an exiled poet like Dante
finishing the Paradisio and Inferno
before the malarial last vision
and stone cold gasp reveals
the world and God as just a trick.

I witness the world pleading mercy
to the executioner before the beheading.
“No, no Madam you must die.  You must die”,
is the death mask maker’s answer before
the axe man takes his three swings.

I wonder, like Keats, before the wax
embalms his consumptive face
“How long is this posthumous
existence of mine to go on?”
The answer coming one year later.

I know the world will die, like John Dillinger
in a hale of bullets under a movie marquee,
its death mask ceremoniously displayed
next to its ***** pickled member
and the Sheep Child bleating for love.




Notes:
L’Inconnue de la Siene is a famous death mask created from a Parisian suicide.  Her death mask was a popular morbid collectible found in many French households of the late 1800’s and early 1900s. The Death Mask was also used as the face of a  popular CPR teaching mannequin known as resuci Anne.

The Sheep Child is a reference to the James Dickey poem about a creature that was the off spring of *******.

John Dillingers pickled ***** is rumored to be a part of the Smithsonian museum’s  hidden collection of oddities.

Death, I notice, often comes
with a smile and a kiss,
a tender tuck of blanket into legs,

a pull to the shoulders
making shroud complete,
a tender whispered secret.  

“Good bye” or “Good life”,
it might be saying.
But so does love.  

2

The  light of the cancer center
is so clean, clear and bright
that it makes me squint

pondering whether the jovial trucker
with the Tennessee drawl
and the St Nicholas beard and physique,

on his fifth dance with the Big C,
that started in his eye
and remission to his liver,

is a harbinger or heavenly host,
a glint from the gaze of God
or the last secret whisper of love.

3

When he is awol the next week
I assign him to the casualty list
knowing that I am the lucky survivor.

I am the thick among the thins
and he is the blessing angel
destined to return to the Lord.

I live with the ambivalence,
the hope and the guilt,
looking for dancers among the blasted.

4

I refuse to name my cancer
not granting it control
or even the idea of breath.

The drugs, however, that’s different.
Oxaliplatin is oxygen.
Leucovorin is lungs.

They pour into my port
and in the liquid air
I learn to breathe again.

I watched my house recede to the invisible
as the water rises and the slow flat boat ferries me away.

My only baggage— the wife in her angels nightgown,
my chihuahua, a revolver loaded with dusty bullets—

all collapsing in the flow, dissolving into rot and mold,
a place not all that comfortable for other people,

a belligerent child evaporating into condemnation,
a concrete overhead blocking my view of heaven.

My archive of creeping shame sheds their existence
until it fits into the reality I see, no longer see.

I can only call this invisible place, this marred space
what it originally was before the water and erasure—

I called it love.
I call it love.

I can’t walk into Walmart and not scan for shell casings,
see the bruises on the fruit and think of those who fell,
those now populating its aisles and borders
and calculate if it’s a number worth the killing
when the man in a heavy jacket with a bulge,
ramrod eyes and spine level as a concrete wall
decides to subtract brown and black from white.

I cant walk a crowded mall parking lot without scanning
for gapped car windows with no panting dogs inside,
searching for bump  stock impressions in the cloth and foam
venting the velocity of aggression in the unfolding humidity,
the rust in the panels mating with the rust in the soul,
the numbers adding to his perfect algorithm of annihilation
unaware that color is an impossible illogical subtraction.

The Aurora of the Dark Knight Rises stains every movie I see
adjusting my seating calculations towards the nearest exit,
making the ten dollar hustle two seats away a quaint fear
compared to the ****** page manifesto of nearby hands
restless for assault when the cool dark light hits every eye.
I’m safe, cuddled in the low numbers of  the matinee.
For now, I’m not worth the killing.

I like America’s Got Talent,

especially when they have dog acts.

I love dog acts.  I cry at dog acts.



I wish dog acts would bark and chase

those young kids and aspiring adults

who sing opera every year and

get into the semifinals off the stage;

chase the pretentious dance troupes

and acrobats; half-funny comics;

the children who sing lustily in adult voices;

the seniors with fading contralto dreams;

the day glow CGI artists who

illustrate on a big, dark canvas;

the magicians with their card slight of hand,

even the ones who just do regular magic—

right off the stage with a bark and

a push of their snouts.



Dog acts are pure.

They sit.  They heel.

They stay.  They obey.

They even sing, dance and draw too.



All acts should be dog acts.

All dreams should be dog dreams.



Every million dollar winner,

mongrel or pure bred,

should have a 100% canine heart—

even though they would trade it all

for a pat on the head, good treats

nice walks with you and belly rubs.

The port rests on my high right chest, a pink crater,
a  cleanly folded linen shroud kissed with tears
wheeled from operating room to recovery  
by melting folds of scrub blues with iodoform scents.

The fragrance of me is creased into a tucked blanket,
monitors on my legs and arm caressing rhythmic,
sounds dissolving into the hum left in a plastic wind-
wafting hints of my odorless crenulated alchemical cure.

My wife holds the origami of my old self in a
blue zip lock hospital bag that opens with a
singe of nitrate, the final aroma of good cooked food
settling on a rack then vanishing into a memory portal.

I smell no future,  just the staleness of hope and fear
as I uncrease myself into my clothes and stand unfolded
at the exit, in the threshold of a shadowless sunlight
whose sleeves I sniff for the blossoming plum tree.