As I lie awake with him

Every short breath,
Every cloudy glance,
Every crushed pill
In peanut butter,

Studies
And examinations,
His kicking leg,

Stored away
Into the future,
Like the walks,

That pass through
The past without a word
Between us,
Hold on to him,

Watch his breaths,
See the moments
As his memory
Moves through time.

Graves of ashes

My father has never been laid to rest,
His name left upon no tombstone,
There is no memorial to remember him by,
Or marble to weather the ages.
More than seven years have passed,
An entire body’s rebirth,
And his ashes remain in a box on the mantle.
This obstinate stance is pitiful,
Though this vigil deserves memorial.

My shadow dog lies in the hallway
With a tumor in his spleen,
His sleeping body trembling
With the cold grasp of what is imminent.
He’s stopped eating,
And since we cannot let him starve,
Soon Smiley will join my father
In a grave of ashes.
We’ve already decided it will be cremation,
To spread him in his favorite park.
He will die, then, and not die,
Every time we take the others to Walnut Creek.

Handsome rests his head between my akimbo arm
And hip. It’s as if we’re both
Refusing to let him die alone.
As evening grows quieter,
With only the scratching on the dogs and shaking of tags to break it,
He is not letting his allergies interfere with the mourning.
We sit like this until morning.

A Difficult Cadence to Maintain

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Limbo of Infants

November is forever falling leaves
As long as I can remember
The scattered piles of the day’s labor
Undone by the icy wind
Whispering words of childhood names:
Rover, Polo, Oxen free.
Of all the seasons I prefer the autumn,
Her sacrifice
For beauty, nature will pluck the limbs of trees
Sending her children forth,
Each one a wish,
A lifetime.
These curled corpses of spring
End up on the embers of a distant fire.

Limbus Patrum

Each of us will one day remember
That feeling of having misplaced a glove
In winter's first snowfall,
Or of losing a loved one to a hard-fought battle
With cancer or to some other question
We cannot answer.

Let of us each remember,
So we don’t need reminding
By another one lying on the cold table,
Tomorrow excised with a scalpel,
Or turned back into yesterday with pharmaceuticals
Whose real names we’d struggle to pronounce.

On the side of the street I am reminded
That a man in his seventies is out of work,
With sick children at home to care for.
Who cares for him at the end of his days?
Does he go to a home that’s out of the rain?

Let each of us know what this man thinks
Every night he enters this place,
Out of time, out of mind.

Heiligenschein (or The Glory of Halos)

On a clear morning with dew on the grass,
Nearly spherical dew drops,
Focused and reflected back toward the sun
Along almost the same path that it took originally,
Retroreflected like memory.
But light doesn’t travel an exact path;
Spreads out just enough to be seen as bright white light
About your head on a damp lawn.

Sunlight enters the small water droplet,
Along its edge
Is refracted, then reflected
off the backside of the droplet.
If I could only remember her face,
                                                        her figure.

Light skims along the surface of the droplet,
A surface wave for a short distance.
Diffraction drops in off the edges of meniscus,
Blows the ring of light recast as glory and the brocken bow.
That split crescent descended to the floor,
Tipped an arrow into the dark, off-target.
Collecting my wits with a quiver,
I cast my spectre to the headlight of the moon.

the sketch (version two)

a shaded line
can be illuminating
by adding layers
of surrounding shadow,
echoing history, passing
hollow notes of a harpsichord
permeating the evening air.
peaks of poles
at five o’clock attention,
the masts rendered
with single strokes
of pencil.
drawn in this light,
the shadows fall out of frame
and out on to the floor
that once was a harbor.