Sometime, as a child
A great uncle, a small suit
Staring into a larger hole
Remembering the smells forever
Sometimes the adults
Something about a black-and-white film star
Or a relative from Norway,
an Auntie from Ireland
Decades wrings life from hard years
Rambling into scenarios of loss
Some who wander are lost
Or get lost, indifferent to finding
Living with absence of fear
Once the guns report
Bullets smash into metal
Skimming past your flesh
You are not in charge
Delicate as we are
Sympathies are few
One by one
They leave
Vague words confuse and deceive
Deceased, passed on, gone
Kindly refrain from mentioning
A celestial birthday
We have no knowledge
Nor choice
Speculation is exercise
For the nervous and ill-informed
Resist the temptation to grieve and bereave
To celebrate & console
Death knows only the past and the future
There is no present tense
Just pain, from time to time.
Hard enough just to eat, brief, sleep, live
They are gone
Perhaps they loved you
Perhaps you loved them
Do not wait to know
There is no answer
Only absence
What legacy do we dream?
Laborious hours of tasks for others
Spawning our own creations
Brought to life for joy and for pain
Or to be warm in the coldest winter
In a land of endless foggy summer
Where the sea reaches out beyond comprehension
and airplanes magically appear from over a dusty hill
Or you, painted jolly with tankard
Hung above the fireplace
Books that open
on a mantlepiece
Or interred in plywood and white
Or abandoned as ashes
Or fertilizing knowledge
Through scalpels and agreements
##
I hold his tiny yellow bald head
Listening to the wheezes
Stopped 3:23 AM
“You must wait one hour to declare”
I clean his chin, lay him down
and close his eyes and mouth
Life in this instant is instinct
And survival
and gently sparing others
From grief and uncertainty
The four stand in a line
On cue, rain falls
We stand til the end — holding on
and watch them shovel and sweep
Then, you might collapse,
you might imbibe, you might justify,
you might pray out
to an imaginary friend
##
One by one, They leave
I remember each
Not for nostalgia or grief
But admiration unspoken
The rough one in leather and muscle cars
and bad decisions, I eagerly complied
Tiny pills at curling rinks
Fights and VW escapes at gas stations
Shaggy haired blonde guitarist
Talked to me like I mattered
13 rosy-cheeked and eager
In green mac jacket like his
The artist, far from home
Often confused and disappeared
Often singing about lusty ladies
and mad experiments in super eight
Long haired city sailor
Young retired from coding
To activism and discretion
Dominos with friends, aneurysm, the end
Ole Gramps and his 67 countries
Nicotine turns to morphine
Me and Uncle Walt
Read him to sleep
Meanwhile in Alabama
The sudden sadness comes, followed by
Deceit, struggle, reprehensible actions
and a litany of notary stamps
Both of the hasheater’s parents
The kind one went to cancer
The blue one, the hard way
I only remember kindness of both
No stranger to hospitals
The doctors’ eyes show bewilderment — and fear
They confer, they draw, they poke
They cannot admit confusion
##
The tsunami warning rings Tuesdays at 10
Would you run? Trampled by the eager and prepared
Or stare the waves down
Twitching legs and bleeding heart
Floods and fires, cold wind and water
Prepare yourself they say with portions and schemes
Or will you choose the present
Leaving sympathies for the past and the future
Do you think you have a choice?
Are you so noble to sacrifice
Running to save the small or the old
With adrenaline and action in your arms
You cannot know
Until the moment of despair
Or will you wait and avoid?
Never consider
Then perhaps
You will be truly
Surprised.