LETTERS TO THE DEAD: TEN

6/10/2018 

Dear Mark,  (1950 – 2017)
         Your last couple of years we initiated a “men’s group
and whenever you felt up to it we’d meet near Berea
at Wood Betony on Clear Creek just above Disputana
in Rockcastle County: place of beauty and the sparkling
water of our “famous” words: our talk of art and design
and poetry and music and philosophy and love, of course. 
You were finishing up a ten part series of abstact lanscapes,
I was writing a verse narrative to go with your paintings,
Phillip was composing a song that he’d present at the opening
and Larry was giving us his philosophical encouragement.
So Mark, tonight I’ll share one of the poems I was working on
that didn’t make it into our show that evening at Swinford Place
Community Building. I call it My Seven Story Story. I finished 
it after your death, and as you probably already know 
that’s you on the top story…and the bottom. 
                                                                                 More later,  Jim

My Seven Story Story
or
What Writing Means To ME

1) All our old stories live within us without hierarchy
            A crow flies west to east across a picture window
            that illuminates the bed of a man on his last day
            My wife kisses his brow in farewell and turns away,
            this act on Celia Street joins the world’s great flow

2) Fiction is autobiography. The same as non-fiction.
     Poetry lives someone else’s life 
            My therapist is a graduate student in psychology,
            as I stumble over affairs that ended my marriage
            she aligns her chair so our knees touch, flips a page
            and says: Shame yourself. it’s the best therapy

3) Capture the accidents
            When I surprise her by moving out into a house
            with a rickety swinging bridge she wades through
            creek water to sing that old blues tune “I Want You”
            but I can tell by the color of the sky it’s no use

4) Time warps are okay. Creating space is even better.
            She’s a rough hewn girl from Angelo Texas
            who wants to sleep with me on Plato’s wheel
            She pulls up the sheets, says her dreams are real
            and her life is like the movie Paris, Texas

5) A single line can make us want to do the story
            We sit sideways on the steps of Lancaster City Hall, 
            she says she’s stuck in the great gray Nothing River
            Her hair falls into her eyes, she sips cold water,
            confesses to the ears of fox-glove and bluebell.

6) Let the story direct itself
             It is the day I found you in flesh and bone-
             like a ball off the sweet spot of a Louisville Slugger
             you fly above the uncut field higher and higher
             All the pasture is upturned, all the grass, all the stone

7) One Question
             There is no philosophy on this death bed, only the wish
             of an old man to sleep with a young woman and relish
             the December light that emboldens the hazel of his Iris