Teresa of Galway. That’s the name I give her as she waits to die. I don’t remember when I began naming them. It wasn’t out of disrespect, but to freeze-frame each life. At the hospice where I volunteer, it seems important to distinguish one death from another …
I.
And in my wake
I leave only black
II.
Dodo. Dinosaur.
The tongue of history waits to devour you
III.
In the cornfield, the boy sips from the pond. I see him drowning, with no way to help.
He wanted to be Saddam Hussein or Al Capone. Genghis Khan or Osama bin Laden. General Pinochet or Bernie Madoff. He wanted to drain marshes, improvise men like dolls on sticks blunt enough to live, to win the unwinnable, to speak and feel pride and terror and welcome.
Then he had a kid, and he walked on water.
deadnettle
let us call them
white flowers calumniate
words these hedgerows
It was the hottest day of the year
and those arrived from war-torn places
played in the park with coloured balls and barbecues.
A man strummed guitar by himself on a bench.
He didn’t care if anyone listened. The notes
leapt into the steaming air like bird seed
chucked to a starving flock and somewhere
Shakespeare was enunciated from an outdoor stage.
Language is a saint suffering thorns
the way a vessel hardens the river between our toes.
When the water of language softens my eyes
to transform the word into flesh, fireworks
explode a holiday sky into scarlet and silver.
And we bump shoulders at the riverfront.
Lean over the rail to view the tallest
floating fountain in the world,
its red and green lines visible on our face.
How I’ve seen, like a magician,
the wet footsteps of a saint walk
on the backs of countless waves as
sailboats moor for the night, bound
“Get to bed, Jazzman,” my teenaged son says,
coming upon my post-midnight melancholy music listening.
“Go to ground. Fox-burrow that brow-furrow.
Isn’t it wild that on a curved planet
we don’t keep sliding off into cold stellar space,
regrets, speakers, vintage vinyl collection and all?”
“The resident orca population in my blood
has declined, son. It isn’t as easy to pick up my shadow
like a briefcase and board the spirit-bus to work.”
