Sitting on the chrome bench
in their room painted taupe green
and the doctor saying the word cancer
the black orange sun
fighting the old flicker fluorescents, I’m
this pile of silt now
magazines into the ill past
vast numbers of magazines into the far

everything you remember
the little house
all the people now dead
someone’s in the leaves
the doctor with his eyes
like pennies
still looking at you
speaking in his clipped language
backward.

The stream swells
snowmelt over blankets of pine needles
the remembered smells are here
embedded in the rough hewn boards’ cabins the
upswept mountain flowers strewn.

A doe and its fawn may pass
looking cautiously
between fallen branches and the new growth
you and I would walk these trails
summer becoming fall then winter.

Ice winds and the now scattered sun
you’d ask me your thought about questions
us in our heavy coats
I miss your gray one
and you. 

We are, all of us
written in disappearing ink, blood.

My bones which hold me up
have been pulverized to dust in you.

The auricle in my ear strains to hear
the slightest canticle in air
of all of your days.

We are falsified by time, allowed to muse
that we’re in any vain manner
a piece of the thread.

However all we truly know or have
is the ever growing weaker and paler
remembrance of that which we were.

As the drops of blood which we’d lately been
thin, become this silver last strand

dispersed ultimately
into all of the universe’s rivers, wide seas.

I think about all of those
in New York City
all housed in their
individual cubes
and I wonder
do they think about me
on the opposite coast
smaller cubes
flatter
do they imagine me
with my white walls
and white
small piece of paper
trying to re-compose you
there from nothing
less than thin air
I have been given
what used to be you
in a small box
your name misspelled on a
stick-on label
I do not know what
to make of
that
that you
the most wondrous
configuration of cells and thoughts
a jubilee of them
and now this
ugly obscene box
and this empty slip of paper. 

The trees rustle and shake
just the same as you did
with your disease
I stay outside quiet and waiting
watch the unkempt days wind and unwind
the dull of metals set aside
called inside themselves.

Are you currently in a place
watching the sings of the gale force wind
the slapping over its banks, water
I keep a vestige of you at last
finally, in me, in loose leaf journals.

I can feel you
the sun sometimes warms
the flowers, the leaves, though still. 

the wind blows like a zither
leaves, branches, flapping,
the house banging against the house

you would love this time of year
your favorite
growing colder, the
pumpkins at the side of the road
like small flames

skeletal winds, I’ll
stand looking at this world
you’ve left

Passion Contents