Last Letters
for Judy
This is to say
we read your message
to take, eat
what’s in the larder,
the food and even the liquor,
to go shopping in your closets,
that the maid was here and left
clean sheets on the bed,
that there is dry wood
stacked for the fireplace;
that you won’t be coming back
and there is another missive
that delineates what should be done
in your absence and might spell
some inevitable questions;
that you felt alone
and very, very tired,
breaking in mind and bones,
angrier than anyone
could know
and to say
that we might comprehend
your reasoning would be
as close to a truth
as love can bring us;
to say peace follow you
and that we wish you’d stayed
at least until today,
that we aren’t hating you but resent
for now the bright, faceted, dynamic space
where you stood moments ago.
Counting Days
“I wore my .44 so long, Lord it made my shoulder sore.”
-Roosevelt Sykes
If I could bind my time in a book
I’d count with a few fingers
the pages turned and understood,
the mornings I’ve awakened
with a clear mind and certain strides.
Between the ranks of lockers
next to the boiler room we sang
They Put Me In My Grave Too Soon ----
old favorites to be that sprang,
composed, from our young heads.
Onward Christian Soldiers
in the auditorium after dawn
put an old time religion
from a crumbling tome in my hands ----
fiery bellies, sordid guts and plundered lands.
“There once was a man who chopped
up his wife and washed her down the drain,”
brother Byrne intoned. Whistling
that one hustled me past the wrestling
room’s thuds and grunts of pain.
Who brightened the sky with me, charged
as we joined like a bulb and socket?
Who stole with me through the stones,
picked pockets as we shed
our shrouds in a beggared world?
Days now are overcast with morbid
mortgages and false securities, caveat emptor
our default. A string of nights the pill jar
twists open and shut,
the dose unchanging.
