One moment you're tenaciously checking pulses
chopping carrots and tomatoes and measuring
Spoonfuls of syrups and splitting pills and counting
Capsules to prove your sister-in-law skipped a dose

And you sign the cards and you lick the envelopes
And you write the checks and do your math and
You dream of France in the summertime after falling
Asleep in front of the TV at 9pm on a Friday night.

There are dishes to wash and shelves to dust full
of five lifetimes of bric-a-brack amassed and leaks
To mend - so much that really matters enough to keep from
Breathing too slowly or speaking of the implications

The next moment it's all vanished and there's one less
Complication but at what point do you cry and at what
Point do you relax after cathartic loss as ineluctable loss
and when is it exactly that it hits you if ever

That some day the complication is you and the vanishing
Provides a blank check to forget and an invitation to
Dance around the vacuum of absence

It's like the time you called your cousin
at 11:30 at night for his chocolate chip cookie
recipe just to hear the sound of another human voice

Or the time you drove four hours just to get a hug
from your mom

It's like when you'd been working here for two
years and your friend Kate comes to visit
and reminds you that you haven't been touched
since you arrived

And you shutter when someone brushes against
you instead

of falling asleep in someone's arms
and you don't lie down with your head
on another person's lap or play with
anyone's hair anymore

It's like it's growing in you--it's like
it's gnawing on tendons and
you can't believe you haven't
jumped

into a waterfall
in seven years

with your best
friends

What grief do we bear by ourselves for naught?
As flames turn to white dot and smoke, then smoke
So fiercest light must wane where hearts do hope
And yet dim tears in vain alone are wrought;
Fear cleaves us from the skies that once we sought
And seeking words that none should e'er hear spoke
In cold of shadow hiding there afloat
Still linger dreams until they are forgot;
Cling fast to wax of candles that now shine,
Do pray some wandering souls with you may heal
And scatter darkness with bright friends at night;
Where severance is a hell of self-design,
Know who and what remains are still most real;
No eyes can see what is beyond the light.

She wasn't afraid of dirt, and never painted her fingernails
until she was old and her youngest daughter did it for her
But she planted Petunias in the springtime and made green beans
with Mrs. Dash and oil in a *** where they boiled on the stove
And she could peel five potatoes faster with
a knife than I could peel one with a peeler. And she dried her car
in the garage after it rained and pressed our shirts.
She quit guitar in her seventies, or maybe earlier I can't remember
because the arthritis was too much for her fingers but she
still sang and still made her pancakes crispy and still went
to church to sit on the pew next to last from the back
And she sang hymns with her sister until her sister was gone
And she drove a pickup into the woods at eighty and wasn't afraid
of getting hurt but she was afraid of the dark
She played Hand and Foot and Checkers and Rummy and went to
yard sales and sent cards to the sick and loved red roses
and the color purple but not the color yellow which she
told my mother she looked bad in and also my aunt.
She spoke with authority and knew what was right without having to ask
anyone but the Bible and she told you what she thought
and loved you no matter what and would always give you a job
if you were sitting because there was always something to clean
or fetch and there was little worse than being lazy.
She bought wagons for the grandkids and covered the fire at night
and sang about heaven and took walks up on the hill until it
got too hard to walk. And she never gave up and she always held
on so tight you could see her knuckles turn white because there
was no letting go.

My dreams are drugs;
my hopes are dope
–the joie de vivre
of old so-so–
from waning eyes
to waxing grace
my spirit seeks
another place
And rhythmically
on pain of death
from newborn cry
to my last breath
with rancid teeth
and rheumy eye
around the globe
cutting soft sky
filling the stars
with water high
to flood and pour
to light and soar
to anger each
contented *****
But not so boiled
nor never baked
swathed transcendence
of all mistakes
melancholy left un-churned
around young danseur
crapping wealth unearned
fueling no immortal work,
marching still
against the dark;
Freshest grass-scent
Lingers long
past broken tractor
at break of dawn
as crumpled shrapnel
and sticks of oak
remain wedged throughout
the auger's blades,
refusing to reap
or shadow wheat;
Therefore, this vision
pulls and holds
on wisest minds,
with fools endures;
musty marble crumbles too
all garish gold
rusts through and through...
spinning slower
then Bosons are gone...
sunny sleep stops
mowing lawn
(All things must break
when left untouched
but touching wears toucher
oh so so much!)
Arrows fly,
inertly tickle
all that's evil
whatever's wicked;
But nothing so so much
as hope
fades quietly
oh so so much.
Slumping shoulders
warring forward
searching ever
for temperate porridge,
concluding all
to dust from dust
Inciting all
from lust to lust
But rarely ever
dreaming truths
science mangling
interstellar flight
because nothing good
rhymes with truths
devoid of pretense
and heckling youths
After crops have rotted
that fed our needs
One contemplates
tending the weeds.
I've lost you now
(I surely hope)
Because at last,
here is the dope:
Riddling madness
is a cancer.
Reading answers
is disaster.
We're much too late
to break the tractor.
Grapes left on vine
do not make wine,
so smiling scythe
will give me mine.
And in the end
it's not defeat:
For Beauty Grew,
And Many Ate.

She scrubbed the floor each day they say
She scrubbed on hand and knee
She dug and plowed and washed and cried
She cooked but not too well I say

Among the brushes and the thrushes
and the hollows and the hymns
Despite the fickle and the wicked
from swirling men to swishing gin

It is bad in this world they say
It is not worth a lick or stitch
It gets all sad with pain and pain
It drowns not washes with its rain

We aren't poor with the Lord they say
We will walk on streets of goldest gold
We will sing and know no loss nor death
We won't really get old though we get old

Among the verses and the hearses
and eager beavers praising praise
Despite the sinners and the winners
with the sermons' end of days

He told the truth they said he said
He told the hardest heard of things
He gave the liars all the fires
He thought he knew the truth I say

Don't leave don't go don't move they say
Don't run away from here your home
Don't think there is a better place
Don't wait up for me at night I say

Among bitter breaths to smell and taste
and just crickets to hear just stars to see
Despite snakes and roads down ***** dirt
and scratchy gravel and hurting hurt

I left them here alone they say
I went and did though I was warned
I drove away at breakneck pace
I long stopped believing in this place

It's cold for August, we say, hiding in air conditioned
negative pressure controlled light high rise rooms;
"Be good", my mother used to say, "or they'll take you
to the 9th floor of Ruby", except now you're here:
After having done nothing so crazy that I can notice
as might merit the magnitude of our current incarceration.

But August is like that, hot or cold, and cruel all the same:
It runs past us before we notice, shoving us clumsily away
from the salvific summer and into the scorching one, subtly
insinuating one's whole life has been prelude to hellfire;
It reminds us what an apex feels like when it's seen
from the wrong side, bitterly recalling greener grasses.

We haven't the fortitude for all this sweat–we who're made
of blood & bones, all full of fat & sinew and circumspection–
I might say we're not august enough for August, if I were
trying to be clever, which, so far it's seemed, has served
as a milky, generally inadequate substitute for real intelligence.

There's no time now, a supermajority of months behind, to vote
for a better life, notwithstanding November's fine shadow or
October's spectral quietude, or the laborious catharthis
of September rains. No. It's time to get ripe. It's time to take
the yellow bus to school and back home. It's time to sweat it out
while we still can.