Poetry
Death Poems
One
TO GROW OLD IS A JOY PRECEDING THE BIG ONE.
Death is a dark chocolate cake,
sweet, and filled with deep blue tortures.
A gold and ivory crown
decorated with damp moss and pearls
is less heavy.
The great blue heron sails overhead,
her crop filled with frogs,
making a shape
of tendoned grace.
A feathered hand and arm
rise and point
where the stream flows.
But that
is imagination
as the rest is. It is form
and emptiness that I die too;
IT
IS
where
the end and beginning
are a car chase
in the movie about warring
armies of mimes.
It is ordinary as a window sill
with worn gray paint
and dull as a bent license plate.
It is the smell of a box
to be dropped in a fire
and ashes
thrown in the eye of a hurricane.
A bonfire made with icicles,
is like this.
It is a burning up of losses.
Sweet and filled with deep blue tortures,
TO GROW OLD IS A JOY PRECEDING THE BIG ONE
Two
DEATH IS COMPRISED OF DEEP BLUE TORTURES
and filled with dark chocolate cake.
Birth has gone with the losses
of endless imagination.
A round brown leaf whirls at the tip
of a spider thread.
I
n
l
a
t
e
Winter
I will study
the whiteness of plum blossoms
and look for knots in an old trunk
at the edge of the forest fire
near some deer bones.
Three
A DEEP BLUE TORTURE
is fearing your death more than mine.
White plum petals fall on snow
in Chinese poetry
and the beauty of the streaming of all these shapes
is fascinating. Your smell and touch
move through mine like red and blue
wildflowers in the meadow
beyond the brick wall.
At night the black cat would shred
the calico cat but there’s a window
between as they jump and growl.
I think
they
love each other.
Battling through walls is a deep blue torture.
Your death would end spring.
See I forget the dharma.
To the sensual fly buzzing in my ear
I am a warm good-tasting stone.
Four
FOUR YEARS OLD, DICK TRACY DIES
in a backyard playhouse, nursed by the girl
from across the street.
We unbutton my shirt.
My skin and breath feel funny.
It is sexy.
My detective hat
hangs on a hook.
I die for Justice:
a hero
<<>>
The plane drops ten thousand feet
toward the China Sea. Yellow oxygen masks
flop from the overhead bins.
Someone begins her heart attack. Death
is a gray endlessness
as the ship levels out into flight
<<>>
John F. Kennedy commands Nikita Khrushchev
to remove the Russian hydrogen missiles
poised in Cuba.
Puppets shake nuclear fists.
Surely
this is my last night
<<>>
Nothing hurts like death
by old age,
or shitting to death
in a fever of dehydration and filth,
or being cut into ribbons
and gobbets
on white rubber sheets,
while young people watch
from the bedside.
How little I learn
of the limitless dharma
— TO GROW OLD IS A JOY PRECEDING THE BIG ONE