The Move

Finally, Mother's frail health obligated the move to a ground floor unit. Years waiting for an apartment, same complex, opposite side. Six days wading through thirty years of memories, what to discard, what to embalm in fresh packing, what to conceal. The sixth day I walked through the room that had long ago been mine, summoning the brazen dead: the beautiful bouts with suicide, the sleeping girl once loved, the reams of words and miles of drawings---enough to plaster across each forsaken history. Closets bared like a soul denuded by war, the ugliness scoured from view. Nothing left to do but to unplug memory, shut down thought, and call up the manager to give it a once-over.

The Charnel Wheelbarrow

He guided it down the stone-paved streets each day, roll over bump,
in the blind Michoacán noon.
The cart was filled with slaughtered animals: pigs, wild geese; once, a goat
with beautiful blue eyes.
The man never spoke, although now and again he would cry out
a shard of some native hymn---to the sun, the basilica saints;
to no one at all.
After a few years, the curiosity died.
I no longer asked myself where he was ferrying
those small beasts, or to what totemic rite he was bound.
We all grow into our own carcass runs,
some less public than others.

On Seeing The Victorian Dead

They hold their recently dead children and try not to move
dressed in their crepe shiny best, the tiny hands
resting on chair-arm,
or nightgown or Papa's gentle grasp;

these are not aliens in sepiatone,
these are our ancestors, whatever the bloodlines;
they are telling us that we
must not wait for a final portrait
to embrace our beloved future dead.

Firstborn

The years will pass
This too, like grass
Will dry and blow away
A dream will stir
The present blur
Of such near yesterdays
And wakened by
The surface sky
Of your subconscious need,
You’ll say my name
Or bloodline's claim
And know you are my seed.
O daughter dear
I fear I’m near
The front row midnight shift
I didn’t know
The random codes
To thank you for this gift;
But Time will wage
Her wars and gauge
Whatever love remains
And I will wave
From some framed grave
And we will look the same.

Devoid of hope, she prays and copes
a dance of marionettes.

This was not how she took her bows
when youth still laid the bets;

and fractured here amongst her peers
and strangers dressed in gray

she must resign to brokered time
as talents peel away.

This Was Once

Wishing there were a perfect freeway over which to soar, a dive, a
napalm-bloom parachute cloud behind eyes that still stain the rooms
of the newly dead. Remnants, these frail grand larceners;
pretty scissors, a band-aid corrosive in its adhesion--
Don't Let Me Go; goodbye.

To Blake

During your day
as the crowds melt into static
and the rehearsals
shift through routine

please know that
in the far aisles
against the light
there is pride
for you there

from someone
who will not
demand your time now
knowing the
distance
has to be crossed
on other terms

knowing a daughter
can be gained
can be lost

but never, ever
forgotten.

Oh, Such Frail Shards That Spent, We've Kept

As years bacterialize their short tally

in memories of Marie, Dawn or Sally

and youthful potency soon erodes

like compost driven by crueler snows

these loves, those limbs of former years

whose emergent tragedies we revere

the younger us we idolize

in snapshots sealed by other lives

let's stop a moment, now

'twixt our curious altars

and stare at the twins

of our sepulcre:

That was never me, and less was you--

but loved the same, this lie we knew.

Remnants

This was easy, then.

That May morning, waking up in a shuttered apartment
filled with soft gargoyles,
the scratchboard fractions
of who I was
staring back from a bathroom mirror;

the knowing grins on faces I never knew
or wanted to see again,

swollen pupils easing back into the carrion duties of addiction.

Yes, to exit was easy,
tiptoeing centuries over the bodies.