When your mother dies
you grieve,
vow to change,
say a prayer,
plant a memory tree.

When your father dies
you swallow hard,
set yourself square,
curse all his mistakes,
and seed an oak.

When your brother/sister dies
you cry
for the good times,
regret their bad ones,
carve their dreams in evergreens.


When your wife, husband, lover dies
you sunder and wail,
fumble for reunion,
finally settle enough
to sow a weeping willow.

When you die
the world will bury you
or spread your ashes
in the peace forest
you have mournfully grown.

Lovers dream of cuddling,
laying flat under the sky,
hand to chin, chin to wrist,
eyes never opening to harsh light,
feet caressing toes
among the daisies sway.

In the past they loved *****,
pulling close in multicolor hugs,
their hands around waist
in almost interlocking circles
hoping for the full union
of own fingers completing the loop.

Now they can only exist back to back,
swooning blind in the sensation of their spines,
daring not the turnaround to face to face,
the desire to complete the geometry of touch,
less they evaporate in the heat killing the world,
the thirsty tall trees reporting their desire.

They slump in their green-white lawn chairs
spaced exactly exactly six feet apart, masks on,
only their silhouettes connecting in shadow play,
speaking ***** and sweet desires to the umbra,
the blackness marrying, impregnating,
rearing their shadowy children in its full shade.

They wonder if you make the other unreal
are they still alive?  Is it the shadow they love?
Is it the corpse, the gravity of flesh gone cold,
that tugs them insanely towards each other?
Wonder what is the perfect distance between
object person and person object?

They know they can always close their eyes and
create  a world better than what they have.
Thus they make an unspoken marriage
that fits the blank spaces between the other
so that when the isolation ends, they can
dance close, kiss, maybe make themselves
real enough for the other to find.

Ariana, adopted the old Greek ways,
when Nikos died diving for sponges.
She encased her curses into two lead stones:
smuggling one into his coffin,
dropping the other into Naxos deepest well.
She made sure Nikos soul would  
carry her curse to the underworld
before it ascended to heaven,
or activated fully on the river of forgetfulness
for Death to see, read, feel her grief.
She had hired the local poet who still 
remembered all the magical phrases
and could reverse the flow of words.
She wanted Death
to throw himself to the crows, 
split like she was divided inside,
perish the same way Nikos drowned,
****** Death’s eyes to drunkenness
till he became a burden to the earth,
a useless sack of spoiled wine.
As she turned back and 
started to look away
she heard Nikos voice echo to her.
She turned around  and  In
the mist that crawled away to the Aegean
was revealed three Cretan hounds snarling 
behind the gate of the rich shipbuilder’s house.
The sea, the earth the sky collapsed in her.
The sound of tides, the swirling dust, the rain were
mocking this girl who knew only ordinary curses,
this widow doomed to live a long, grieving life
listening for Nikos sounds until her very end.

Perfection can only be seen in the descent,
the glow of spotlights colliding to true whiteness,
the realization that grief touches the ground.

Mary, they say, you never experienced birth pains,
but the linen folded eternally beneath your son
shows that his final blessing transferred all  to you.  

Your tears wash his feet, and I imagine,
you wiping them dry with your hair,
a doting act of love he passed to his disciples.

Your grief remains in your soul.
Only the pain is collected in
the last descent of angels.

I feel the slow bump when
the descent must hit the earth,
the slight stumble to awkward reality.

I wash my feet everyday to honor
the perfect glory I’ve been blessed to see.

Note:
This is a memory of the 1964 World’s Fair where I saw the Pieta in the descent of an escalator. I was seven and  the experience lasted all of fifteen seconds, roughly the time it takes to read the poem.

(In homage to William Carlos William)

Outside was my red bicycle
leaning against the wall
next to a red wheelbarrow
on which nothing depended on.

I was the kind of child who
was always daydreaming  
himself to victory and today
I would win the Tour de France.

So the plan was to practice
beyond my own wobbling peddling,
like the unbalanced red wheelbarrow
my father pushed among the chickens.

I felt the heat, the flame of potential speed
where so much could happen
and depended on my straight control
in a world zooming by in flame

until the wind was red wings,
only my own red thoughts ablaze
in the warp and the things I hated
of the world were no longer in myself.

until I flew over the handlebars
hitting my forehead on a
sky blue Cadillac door handle,
the scar following me to the future.

Now I nick the tiny flames of memory,
as I push the red wheelbarrow
up the hill as if my life depended on it,
even as it always wobbles down to the chickens.

It was the light that told Vincent,
the one which always told him the truth
reflected his soul’s desire,
the glistenings of his mind,
that this mass of  gnarled roots
would be his last vision.

He could feel the gun smoke
creeping into his soul,
corrupting his thoughts,
the very rays of his world,
even his beloved
hog hair brushes and pigments

as he walked the Rue Daubigny
pass the Church at Auvers
he needed to canvas in June
when the flint of its history,
death, faith, passion and beauty
impelled him to create,

pass the wheat field absent of crows
which made the world seem more
beautiful with its darkness
hovering over the light of July,
diminished now to ordinary light,
smoke, haze and fog.

He felt his world constricted to
a blue room with a blue bed,
a blue chair wedged in a corner
draped in blue shadows
which could not be mixed
to the perfect colors.

When he saw the gnarled roots
exposed in late afternoon July beams
he knew that he would not live
to see the first dawn of August,
that this would be his last
perfect beautiful, silent spot.

He painted smelling the gun smoke coming,
the smoke turning into a bullet
as he passionately tried to  capture
life itself frantically and fervently rooting itself,
as it were, in the earth and yet being
half torn up by the storm.

--After Rainier Maria Rilke


The washers have lived with death
as they have with the lamp,
the flame and the  dark,
the nameless rinsing of limbs,
the even more unnameable nameless.
without histories relative to them.
Their sponges dipped the water
then the silent throat,
trickled rivulets on their faces,
waiting for it to absorb,
to convince themselves more than anything
that the body no longer thirsted.
They only stopped their toil
to turn their head to cough.
The older ones unclenched
the hands of the dead
that refused their final repose.
Only their shadows
****** the quiet walls,
the net of silent life
extinguishing to last existence
that ignored their shrugs
as the last now antiseptic corpse
was finished and the window shut.