Excerpt
EulogyTo allow silence
To admit it in us
always moving
Just past
senses, the darkness
What swallows us
and we live amongst
What lives amongst us
*
These grim anchors
That brief sanctity
the sea
Cast quite far
when you seek
in your hats black
and kerchiefs
to bury me
*
Do not weep
but once, and a long
time then
Thereafter eat till
your stomach spills over
No more! youll cry
too full for your eyes
to leak
*
The words will wait
*
Place me in a plain
pine box I have been
for years building
It is splinters
not silver
It is filled of hair
*
Even the tongues
of bells shall still
*
You who will bear
my body along
Spirit me into the six
Do not startle
at its lack of weight
How light
I shall be released
What we love
will leave us
or is it
we leave
what we love,
I forget
Today, belly
full enough
to walk the block
after all week
too cold
outside to smile
I think of you, warm
in your underground room
reading the book
of bone. Its hard going
your body a dead
language
Ive begun
to feel, if not
hope then what
comes just after
or before
Lets not call it
regret, but
this weight,
or weightlessness,
or just
plain waiting.
The ice wanting
again water.
The streams of two planes
a cross fading.
I was so busy
telling you this I forgot
to mention the sky
how in the dusk
its steely edges
have just begun to rust.
Ode to Boudin
You are the chewing gum
of God. You are the reason
I know that skin
is only that, holds
more than it meets.
The heart of you is something
I dont quite get
but dont want to. Even
a fool like me can see
your broken
beauty, the way
out in this world where most
things disappear, driven
into ground, you are ground
already, & like rice
you rise. Drunken deacon,
sausages half-brother,
jambalayas baby mama,
you bring me back
to the beginning, to where things live
again. Homemade saviour,
you fed me the day
my father sat under flowers
white as the gloves of pallbearers
tossed on his bier.
Soon, hands will lower him
into ground richer
than even you.
For now, root of all
remembrance, your thick chain
sets me spinning, thinking
of how, like the small,
perfect, possible, silent soul
you spill out
like music, my daddy
dead, or grief,
or bothafterward his sisters
my aunts dancing
in the yard to a car radio
tuned to zydeco
beneath the pecan trees.
From the Hardcover edition.