I’m getting giddy
as the summer fades
into  yellow fall,
and the sky father
grants me the comfort
of storing his favor
on my tongue-
enough to close my eyes
and know that it will last  
for the coming snow,
the clean pure white that
will eventually evaporate as one
in the hibernating warmth
always underneath.

The young can not write about dust.
They know only it accumulations
on floors, shelves, ***** panes.
Only the old know its subtle contours,
the futility that comes with just moving it around.
They know that the sun and stars are dust,
schools of ash that follow all life’s currents and
that blossom the new fields under Grandfather Mountain.
They bend with the promise of the long, wavering grasses,
and flowers with their variegated indigos,
everything pursuing joyously their singular futures,
swearing testimony to the power of dust’s bounty.

Again, today,
the cowboy will close
his eyes
and listen to the hooves
of wild horses
all around him

knowing that
his well-trained palomino
will take him home
like a lover
who knows
what his lust wants—

knows the way to him,
through the black covers
of that dark room—

even as the returning
creates and then destroys the
greening prairie, the chambray wind.

As I get older I don’t dread death coming closer.
It is closer.
It will come as a newborn:
seeding so long in me,
that I would chide it for taking its time.
I will not scream when it head comes out my body.
I won’t even be amused by such a Hollywood trick.
And when its held before my eyes
trickling with all my blood
I will simply reach out and hold it close
to my chest,
run my fingers over its head
until it stops wailing,
grows silent-
and there is nothing left for me to say to it,
nothing left to do
but  kiss this  life of mine,
shed a joyful yet mournful tear
and wait for it and myself
to fall asleep.

After forty years the brownstones
still seemed the same except
for the newer cars and the people
in fashionable clothes walking
golden dogs in chic comfort vests,
all living in houses he couldn’t afford.

He couldn’t believe he grew up here
when the streets were lively
with black live matter
and Gerald every summer
out there  with his roller
painting fatsfix’s store front red.

Now there sits Wray’s fancy drink café,
his name in a stylish white font
outcropping from a charcoal awning,
a cocktail glass replacing the Y, a large
BLACKLIVESMATTER banner out front,
proudly put there by its white owner.

The old El Diamantet is now
Castro’s Authentic Mexican Cuisine  
sharing space with a Dunkin’ Donuts
with expensive bicycles racked
to the declining handicap ramp.
The Mobil on Fuller- a Citgo Market.

The Meats and Greens turned Bamboo’s
and the farmacia now just  a pharmacy,
and the biggest insult of them all,
New Murken’s Restaurant which
served the best corn-beef sandwhiches
is an “eat big, leave happy” Mega  Bites.

The homebuds  had split, vanished
to memories of stinging high fives,
basketball jams and feeling up
Zoe on a fine Friday night,  the smell
of her  lingering in forty years  of regret.
There’ll be no bros coming from  these doors.

His heart  felt the sting of going home to a home
that was no longer his and no longer wanted him.
That past was a meat offering to this new block-
as if his blood and flesh had been scrubbed away
in the white wash of neatly trimmed roses behind
spiked  fences-  as if that there of his never happened.

“What was here before we came?” he imagined
the children asking the parents behind the doors.
“Nothing of note,” they would reply using the
same line the real estate agent routinely recited
to anyone who inquired about what existed
before the abattoir came and moved  on.

I  play with the sand,
crush it to a globe of
sun dried golden particles,

until the thing in me
that is the ocean calls to
release it to the tide

so full of  the incessant
sorrow  upon sorrow of other’s  tears
forced daily to kiss the shore-

its roar constantly reminding me-
the ocean hates the land-
the ocean does not love the land.

He lacked the skill to make it true, the crib,
so he  assembled it from a wordless diagram,
an ark of 5 panels, 32 screws and bolts, 3 tools-
tightening it just enough, until the memory
of its creation fixed solid in his soul, well past
the 1000 days of the child dreaming in it,  
the 30 years of lying unassembled in attic dust,
its existence cradled, tightened and retightened,
in lullaby and bedtime rhyme- until the child
reached his Jesus year, and needing a
second-hand cradle for his soon to be first born,
noticed it in the growing dawn and dust and
thought “Dad, I know I have the screws for that.”