Nocturnal chords nearly dying

the heart unstitched goes hard, remember the world’s weight, the cats carry shadows on the tip of their tails, perpendicular in the dusk as the banished move pearls, tethered on a string bitten down between breath and gum, longing in the wind from which another ghost story begins, the heartbeat of the swarm words sugar, sodium-rich and rivering licked-up loss, what you once gave entered through the basement window and slicked up the stairs a rose in one fist, a raccoon skull in the other, betrayal caressing spine, wedding vows between its claws and you wait your entire life to listen, clutch it close to your breast and name it, then rid it from your life like a spare rib you once penned it love the grief chords in a song we used to sing together

death comes playing an old Gibson, dear, a sibling of the one you once saw in the corner of a thrift store on E. Carson bargained off the floor in a dank bedroom in East Liberty, in a flash, poetry and sweet somethings and a bottle of Honey Jack and a chorus you made up on the spot, a guitar never so cheap, a moment never so expensive, a bargain we shared with night-run mascara, the tin-cans we tied to our backs once we hit a thought, our lives would go on creaking together, how it almost all went wrong in the knife turn at night when the deer caught in the light of our high-beam life got stuck under the wheels and desire’s language smacked into cliché, death came as Chet Baker crooning love, almost blue

beauty slept in the bed of the folds of your eyes, life leaned in as a ambulance’s red stitched pillow we shared each Saturday, still death went sculking in childhood rooms where you drank up demise in the shape of your sister’s scar, life fell as a milk tooth to the floor, youth plunked down in a pink coffin, her name all syllable, Stephanie, never shortened to Steph, once puppy love shook your sides and a hymn entered hurt until you sang it asleep in the backroom, three chords strumming out gloom, and the refrain, the stripes of your shirt pully'd over my heart, gravitationally the gut beneath forefinger and pink, the heart, the heart

                                                                                                                                                   goes agile and dips on singing.

The Sky Written Red as Your Name in a Letter (ii)

i
the dead dance their scheme throughout the night
fold themselves into the apparition of leaves
friend to friend, toe to stem
on rooftops along green-red mumbling streets
a theatre of lines and pavilion of shadow 
songs a circus of algebraic promise
a cathedral for an ant’s home dug into a corner of a Mews stable
a child scampering, sings and clongs
the prayers in the backroom behind the dishwasher’s sink
outside the soiled window falling rock like thunder from height to the bay crackle
who shall share the joy under which trees and pinecone blossom
you
your children long in their summer running
the light’d light of those who left
a muddy gallop toward distance and an oracular sea
the sky writtenred as your name in a letter

ii
we build a home from gothic pine, ribs and stargut carpentered 
from one other
we still, like the birds chained, our legs to the soil our eyes to the sky, wings batting brokenly forth
what calibrates the size and weight of the human voice 
built from letter, limb and land
the ligature and loss measured spoons sourced from a dream 
this thin, fuscia afternoon charts that song you once listened to
as you hid from the police between kisses and headlight sweep
If you're not busy being born, you're busy dying*
a drunk bartender once wrote on a napkin, have you forgiven him
as he sparrowed out the backdoor with pain in his hands
then after the flame and departure, burnt words became blackbirds 
billowing in the leaves.

iii
now that you’ve gone, hear me out
if you're not busy being born, you're busy dying*
let doubt be your beacon 
so what does love have to do with any of it
after all
letter after letter on the rooftop and in the field?

*Dylan

A Poem Comes Home

Q: Did you know

stories slow on tongues, alight along aligned verbs
wayward adjectives and delinquent pauses
the steadfast algebra with which we gain flight
no matter their cracks or the cold, accordingly

                                                                        we bruise and tilt beneath the Ferris wheel

aloft the apple falls in mid-flight, an enunciation
a mirror turns away from the sun
and we hair by hair, tooth by tooth
fingertip by finger’s tip
circle time in the sky, below
mud in the park a stanza for a Victorian story

the moment arrives in a black cab, a crisis

                                                                   in the background, boots toss up names with a splash

long ago love tackled out the back door 

slipped on its Mackintosh against the fog and shadow
the rain rampant in the still park beside the fireplace

the carpentry of our syntax snug in a tea jar 

promises lost in the drunken miscalculation of night

                                                                                 we sift and seed, together

slow stories crayon tongues & verbs

                                                                                 tis gone and will not answer, exit ghost*

and there we go, gaining flight

we

                                                                                 played til our bodies glowed.”**

A: I am trying to carry you dad and your bag of grief as if it were my own, and it always was and has been and will be again, but you born me right to do that, and if you life would allow me to shoulder it high and if only i could lift it so high that you would not bare its weight the way you bore my up high to climb the tree before we both fell beneath the slope of the tree on the hill underneath a lantern of apples and i loved u, and loved u, let that be enough, can u sense the easing, daddy, in your going can you pa. can you as we go gaining flight

*Shakespeare
**Joyce