They dragged me
screaming
down the highway
to their sacred hell.
My torture was a whisper
to their grinning
over fires
that fester.

Nothing in nature
can rewind:
naught but the hand
of God.

Upon retaking my first
steps
anew
I mounted the struggle.
Peace my birthright.
Truth my shield.
Bold conviction
became shaking steps
ascending
the stairway
to heaven.

With my folly transparent,
I witnessed
the cackles and claws
of the demons
to be mine own whip.

I set down the weapon.
I let the ashes of despair consume it.
I do not look back,
for the stairway is its own guide.

Bittersweet is the rasp of envy,
and gratitude: the beckoning of peace.

Coffin

Building your own coffin is
more complicated than a bread box
Spruce Goose without a wing span
a pine box to rile the neighbors

like chainsaw sculpture or
an un-ironic ark.  
If the dying carpenter/essayist
is half as good at working

wood as writing, burning
it will almost be a shame,
the carefree hours scavenging
weathered boards, whine

of the joiner/planer, heavy cream
bead of wood glue oozing
the length of mated seams
firm embrace of pipe clamps.  

I read again his thoughts
on hand sanding, how rounding
edges helps put things in perspective.

“I have loved the stars too fondly
to be fearful of the night”, a line
from a poem by Sarah Williams

what better choice
for inside the lustrous lid?
  
Perhaps I’ll try my hand
at bookshelves, a kayak
from wafer thin strips of cedar

but a coffin, a poem
for inside the hand rubbed lid
getting the words just right
could take the rest of my life.

A most pious man
whose well-tempered music
brushed the cobwebs
from the throne of God

Evolution was made manifest
across deep time
these lyrical figures
achieve the same purpose
in the space between the morning star
and the dawn

A fallow field
is sewn with pearls
a moonlit beach
illuminated by shadow
every scrape of the fiddler's bow
merges mind with the present
harvests the meaning
in the moment

The composer
that good man
was
for a time
church organist at St. John's
its notable steeple leaning
all askew
as a rebuke against God
or perhaps the drunken architect

A finger of candlelight
plays across the manuscript
a fugue echoes
through the still church

And though no living person
on that still winter's night
shares the organist's solemn delight
the stirring mass of possibility
that is posterity
awaits