yearly back door guest
orange red solstice sun sets   sinks
toward winter   heat lags

We are guileless lunatics
living unwitting burlesque.  

We tie our shoes, we blow our nose,
we shout “Hail fellow! Well met!”  

We walk tightropes, balance with hope, 
forget that death is our net.    

Unseasonably cool

For a summer day

A monarch planted

Right over your heart

A living brooch, like you

Were some great sunflower

And left me to form

The chevron, the aggregate apart

Walking in the graveyard
behind the church on late summer afternoons,
you could hear the choir practice in the distance,
an accompanist banging out the chords
of Bringing in the Sheaves on the Baldwin,
the voices old & ragged but blending nicely,
floating out across the cemetery like a fog.
Sometimes you’d find the old sexton
sitting under the mimosa tree mopping his brow.
It’s our job to keep this place up for eternity, he’d say,
as if to remind himself.

You’d check in on your brother, younger than you
but still long gone, your uncle who survived Normandy
but not the cancer. Your friend from high school
dead of AIDS though no one mentions it.
Another friend from drugs, same thing.
What would they say when you ended up here?
Didn’t matter. There’d be so much else to listen for:
the faint sizzle of the sun as it sinks behind the horizon,
the whisper of mimosa blooms floating down
like parachutes on a beach, & in the air
everywhere, all that harvesting & reaping & rejoicing,
all those sheaves.

Capture me in neverending sunlight,
between fiery rays and welcoming warmth.

Hold me in your view
and adjust the settings to seize this lasting illumination.
No, I won’t be bleached or obscured.

Take the photo in all the light that shines,
and remember today marks the longest exposure.

little death
recently died now
the big one looms
you’re a soft target
to what comes:
the heart jumping
like jack
the tongue rolled
up like a sleeping
bag, touch under
the brush
of sandpaper
your face oblivion 
in the morning sun
& in the no moon
of the new moon
your garden’s
in menopause.
even the young
are dying old

what will it be
not to be here but
only a wave in the sky
or a particle
thrown into the ocean
at high tide

I am a lung,
holding
breath. 

Sticking,
red,
skin
slaps
when picked off
the warm leather
beneath me.

Susannah north drives me
into a spiral of 
counting rings
and I wonder,
where did the time go?

Father’s Day cards sit silently
on the mantle, the dog sleeps
at my side, not a noise from
outside the window, inside,
that musical note of quiet
insists itself to my ears. I heal.

every morning, they drew from the well,
assuming there would always be plenty

they did not fully understand 
where the water came from

nor did they bother to look
for another source

they were not good stewards,
thinking there would always be enough

nor did they care for the well itself,
to shore up its walls

one morning, there was 
nothing to draw

panic solved nothing,
nor did wishful thinking

they now hated the well,
forgetting the years of plenty

they knew how to draw water,
but not how to adapt

though the water pointed the way–
accepting changes in the earth,

changes in the sun,
the rain, the snow

so the water would endure,
no longer revealed to them

a man with matted hair
shouldering a blanket
searching for shelter