LETTERS TO THE DEAD: TWENTY-ONE
  
6/21/2018 To Mike Lally (1941 – 2015)

Vignettes (…with a tossed salad on the longest day)  

Going against men, I have heard at times a deep harmony
thrumming in the mixture, and when they ask me what
I say I don’t know.  
(“The Contrariness of the Mad Farmer” by W. Berry)  

1 a.m.
At my house on Old 19
you find the silo behind the barn
and howl and howl till the echoes flow
up to the stars  

3:15 a.m.
Single bulb in the jail house ceiling
becomes your Singular God
who awaits further instructions  

4:55 a.m.
Checking freight cars for black survivors
the trains of Birmingham
barely miss our naked man  

7:30 a.m.
You turn my poem over, write:
going down to strawberry town
to fetch a pocket full of mental
health then coming home alone
with a pocket full of pretzel
  
8:18 a.m.
Bon Harbor but no safe
sailing.  Tsunami
over a bowl of cereal  

10:30 a.m.
The Great Chase of Pat
around town
with a baseball bat
because you never strike out
 
11:19 a.m.
Yeah that’s right
throw your lithium into Utah sand
follow a bigamist to his wigwam
and somehow come back alive  

Noon
This is the famous day
you (we?) flush Kevin’s head
in the toilet, screaming:
Stop Being A Sissy  

2:11 p.m.
On your last Gin Fizz
she walks across the street
to Dutchman’s Bar with the news
Dad died  

2:12 p.m.
All the kindnesses begin  

3:00 p.m.
Twelve steps twelve thousand times:
ex-cons, whores, addicts
you bring them home  

5:00 p.m.
Tuesday with Jude
without fail (and Friday too)
if just to snore at the couch  

7:08 p.m.
Dirty Nun joke at Mom’s visitation,
3 totaled cars,
$100 bills raining on strangers,
anger lost with Wall Mart receipts,
he’s somewhere, just not here  

9:16 p.m.
I walk Jude’s dog up Barret St.
A man appears out of the gloom:
sorry about your brother
he saved my life
can I have a cigarette?
  
11:49 p.m.
In Wendell Berry’s book
between pages 44  & 45
I find a poem of yours:
Steel Square
The clerk’s balding red hair
hangs over his wire rims.
“Look at this one,” he says.
“It has a twenty-four inch body
with a sixteen inch tongue.”
Living anatomy is never so concise,
I think.
Nor could it have such an appetite.