When your eyesFrom the deepest blueTurned into waterFlowing from within Magical touchCold breath of deathSad and stillTranscendental Your heart was tightAnd so aliveHot air boostingBlood and fire Elements revealedBlessing your bodyA new startAs there is no time Out of life
death
When Silence Fails
It is almost exactly ten yearssince we shared drunken kissesin an unheated barin Chattanooga, Tennessee.Later that night, drunker still,a kiss broke into laughterwhen we rolled off my bedand fell to the floor. Ten years later: youstill in Tennessee, in Nashville, mein Phoenix, Arizona. A catch-upconversation: You told me aboutyour kidney transplants, addictionto pain medication, recovery,getting […]
Death
opens as a lotus petal all at oncein all directions under the kind pressureof twilight a translucentblue topaz feeling disappearing into an ancient softness
Spreading Ashes in the Ausable
more coveted than winefrom milk, the masteralchemists of China coulddo no better than these cloudschurning into rivers, the way cottongrass renews itself or how a son returns in time to let go.
A Drowning
No one could save himonce he was lodged beneath the rapids.No one could breathe for himonce he was hauled onto the rocks. Weeks passed and the trips to the hospital became pilgrimages.We were just teenagers. Too arrogant to admit that it could have been any one of us. When it was my turn to go […]
Unsolicited Advice to the Class of 2020
Grip life the way a father holds his son’srib bone after a car bomb in a Baghdad market. Treat it with speechlessrespect. Awake each morning in its belly, licking the mucous from the rubberyintestine of your own ignorance. Chase life. As children run after dragonflies.Unlock the jar and hold it like a prisoner of evolution. […]
Radiation from the Big Bang
Dear grandpa,I never met whopulled the trigger. They say that youhad enemies andit was the Depression, but who really knows?Your ashes were scatteredsomewhere in the valley and the records back thenwere never kept the way theyshould have been. Anyways, there is far too much chatterabout all of that now, in the background, as the evidence […]
Whispering
Under a dying Sycamorea soft handsimply rises on my chest bringing something closeto comfortso lonely and satisfied.