Now that the sun has abandoned you along with this world and the other stars, it’s time to empty your backpack of all the tools you learned to use to forge a life you could live with. Now you have nothing left, no money, no keys, only your curiosity about what you could never know at all. Your passions and your discoveries have not succeeded in putting you on any paved road. Now you are nothing but the disease that has come for you and overcome you, nothing but a dream that dreams of itself, nothing but love, disembodied and throwing itself into nothingness in all directions. Now you are only the distance between what you were and what you wanted, and yet you leave traces of your memories and hopes, your yearning and fears, as the rest of us go on, sweating and spitting at the great gaping nothingness closing in on us.

if absence makes the heart grow fonder

i fear i am destined to love you

until the end of this life

and well into the next

when i first saw you,
after so many years–
after the fights,
the frights, the flights
of fancy, after your glare,
my prayer, the affair
with Nancy–
when i first saw you,
after so many years–
the feeling was gone,
there were no more tears

The fear I felt this past November
Has
Swollen
Like  the Hindenberg blimp
   stopped dirently
Overhead
Seconds from exploding 
Time and space back to 1775,  so
How 
Now our own troops marching feet
Bear a din, underscoring beat,
Compelling
Alarm!
Urgently
To ask, to answer the question:
On which side align
The actual  insurrectionists?

You ask, the you of all the left

Summer days glide in
like a hero with her cape

Arms open
ready to bring me in

Safely under her cover
I find some time

To stop the racing thought
to soothe an aching heart

When the sun returns
it starts to burn

Away the blur
that film I live under

I can see my life again
each moment more real 

The faces I love
and the person I am

Not chasing the worries of tomorrow
but living here, living now

Plans so grand
left buried in the sand

Because I freeze
and I rest

But the calendar is the enemy
no hero can defeat

I’m supposed to want
the Fall to come?

And all the things
Summer just saved me from

he begins with the long effort of moving mom from prone to upright
this takes the better part of good morning
today the laundry joins the ritual  wheeled slowly to the communal room
he’s made a thing of it   speaking of its arrival for days   as if some profound second coming

this is what it’s come to
freedom
the American way
my parents squirreled away behind protective doors
we all passing furitvely beyond these walls 
navigating our paths 
living the illusion
avoidance of such fate

Down in the dark of Sand Cave,
January stone on his chest,
Floyd Collins called for daylight—
his boots wedged in the narrow black,
his lamp a single trembling star
between the sleeping bones of the earth.
They brought him bread and coffee,

threaded through with hope,
and the talk of rescue—
shouting down the passage
where Floyd’s voice echoed
like something half-born,
half-forgotten.

Above, men argued by lantern,
farmers and newsmen and engineers,
their pickaxes flaring
in the hungry winter air.
Children pressed to the rail fence,
their faces pale as limestone,
waiting for a miracle,
waiting for the news.
Fifty-five feet they dug,
shaft by shaft,
the mud a hungry animal
swallowing every tool.

The world turned its gaze
to Edmonson County,
as if a single life
could fill the emptiness
beneath the hills.

Nights, the wind would carry
the sound of prayer—
wives and sisters
knitting hope on borrowed time,
a father pacing the bitter ground
while the cave pressed its secret
against the world above.

Floyd sang hymns to keep his fear,
dreamed of the sun on his back,
the green rise of spring
outside his father’s door.
But the cave had its own hunger,
its stone set like a final word.

In February, the song grew thin,
the lamp guttered,
the shaft filled with sorrow.
They could not bring him out—
not Floyd, not the hope
that lingers in narrow places.

The cave kept its secret.
The shaft, now green with moss,
remembers the hush of crowds,
the patience of men
with dust in their eyes.

Somewhere, the earth holds
the echo of a name—
Floyd Collins,
dreaming beneath Kentucky,
where the stone will not answer
but the people remember
how long a single voice
can call for home.

The dark clouds fill
the sky of my heart when
a friend dies, lightning bolts
hit indiscriminately, rivers rush
the shores, attempt to wash
away the harbor.

It is a different song of
grief, a barrage of memories
stuffed into a quilted, cotton bag
zipped to keep them
from escaping and getting lost
in the forest.

It is a hike up the mountain
dread of each step, orchestrating
a careful walk.
Don’t fall, don’t tumble, don’t
fly like the barefoot angel
trying to reach heaven.

It is the playlist of songs that
sealed the bond long ago in a
Lincoln Continental convertible
top down, voices screaming in
unison with lyrics that splash
across the universe.