breath is taken when love dies we say
he has passed away like a river frighten
by the passing waves that drown on shore
the way a passing storm that downs a tree
frightens crying geese as darkness sways
cold twilight! we say a friend has died
love’s past our side we drift alone! past our breath
down the way where trees like geese
as they dive the black flood to sea
because death is an undying body for the one illuminated
it goes away when we die but while alive it comes to us
with a dark that should it die a body would go away forever
like a god & not like a fly
yuba river
a wild abandoned (immortality welcome!) the perpetuations pushed
outside—shunted, the everlasting—here is a garden so hospitable even death
last but a lifetime
Squash Blossom
The touch of a lover every in argillite where the trace of a river is remembered
like a wind? Lovers the resignation? Never to forget the catastrophes—
stones, these surrendered sediments in spent floods. Those in this sea of time
interred by the countless dead.
Never to have heaved & embraced the sex of a glacier. Never to have drained—
we, the withdrawn, open, erect, sometimes breathless. Never like a continent?
Can an old earth, ravished by memory, recall no lover like us though we have all
submitted?
Touched it incessantly?
God is waiting for a death Lazarus will die from because Lazarus is dead
with a death that makes stars shine—as dead as a bare tree of Bethany
beneath its bark is green, for to die from is to be alive in the dark sola
& Lazarus is God’s dying need.
To be dead with a death that one cannot die from is why God will not bury
the dead for God in death is Lazarus when he wakes.
Lazarus is dead because God is awake & Lazarus is waiting.
If Lazarus was awake & God dying, Lazarus would shine like a light
through the wild leaves of Bethany’s trees. He would be like a sun waiting
for a death that Easter is alive with for Lazarus will wake when God,
who is waiting, will not because Lazarus is dead with a life
God has died from.
What the dead need to be everlasting is what a god needs to die
which is what a sun needs to shine & what dirt needs to come alive.
Yawning Abyss
Where matter is not, space intervenes. Because it seems to be the emptiness atoms need, its presence maybe a way our absence is pregnant.
We begin in a pore & end in the presence of the vanished. Even the dehiscence of stars & their “seeds” that seek to endeavor the complexities of sex, join us there. With some torment, we give in to this sprawl of emptiness—yet it is no more than what an egg must penetrate.
"I always felt he was getting the better of me."
words from a good friend of the deceased
"He was my first love & my favorite dog...full of kisses, full of mischief, and full of soft, soft fur."
another whose life was increased by the deceased
"Sometimes I would look at him & say "canine ludens". He taught a man of the middle age, how to play again."
a life-long companion
"He bound us together & showed us the way."
his "kid" brother
"He was the fire we gathered around."
his sister
If a dictionary is but a mythology of thought
the effort Ezekiel’s taken, must one day be undone
by diffusion of Life Sciences, or selection of skeletal mass
& volume of gray matter, or of other complex vehicles
that bear no resemblance to eye & wheel.
All for naught, the intimacies of God that ravish
the living like a rain received in the ash
of grasslands the wind burns to the ground?
No longer call upon the old way
but cry out its ruination: Death! Death!
the freedom that devastates; entropic
vagueness; the black we mistake--- it wheels & ruts
the path we take; the trail we blaze.
