Tent and campfire abandoned, the log smokes its last.
Moonlight mixed with gin drips from a canteen slowly.

What doesn’t break us, conspires to kill. Waiting. Words.
Ink bleeding into a wind that turns mean slowly.

The flame jogs woodenly, struggling to catch. Blood, too,
is a heavy breather that serves its queen slowly.

Guitar strings run the length of my arm like six roads.
Cut the strings! Let these lines learn to keen slowly.

Into the blank margins, the Laugh Guru laughs, as
if the heart could maroon its routine slowly.

Vesper smoke dissolves in an illusion of ease.
Evening invented it. Let night come clean slowly.

to find her mother,
father, and babysitter dead.
A mother and baby

are diagnosed together.
A sophomore girl is gunned down,
by mistake, in an elevator.

I switch off the television
and step outside. What does it take
to see what darkness gives?

Tonight, it crosses my mind
how gone you are, and stars,
if stars say anything, say Otherwise.

if we touch a silent match
to history and watch

it pull against the wick,
the flame a past that wakes

again and again, a man
who can’t quite understand

where he is. Or who.
What we cannot know

we give a date, a place,
the missing part of us

we see now everywhere,
though who’s to say it’s there

until the candle makes
it so, until this smoke

signs the atmosphere.
Earth turns and so turns over

some dull and weary shovel
that cannot grieve them all.

Death too is growing old.
And strangely it’s the child

who talks to things that burn,
waiting for an answer.

It’s the trance of those
who sit motionless

in dying rooms and stare
into the candle’s star,

thinking it’s their story
now, their body’s body,

their dim sight year by year
passing through the fire.

above the bed.

Half asleep I see her:
shoulder-length hair,

bullet eyes, dimed mouth —
dimpleless — and think

of equestrian shows, the manicured —

mannequined — faces and lawns,
or the race track there by the river:

their hooves, the thunder
of them through the dirt,

their short-breathed beauty,

and then of you, my wife —
our search in search of searching:

the babies fast asleep,
us spooned on our sides,

the TV, muted, plays some movie

of dreams or nightmares,
and we count together

the whirls of the fan,
each breeze

the lick of another year.

Reports on the radio & news stories: nothing we believed,
& weeks since I saw you, your plane then on its flight across
the country, when we said next time those weeks would
never pass. They were horrific & walked slowly down our street,
& still I thought: some prank, before their guns spit webs
of pink & bodies turned to cocoons, before the man bolted
& didn’t make it alive, lifeless & bouncing near the truck
that sped away, before I wanted to scream for them
to find you, since I knew then I could not be saved. But I waited
in the dark, my face hidden in the black, & watched
as they vacuumed & collected, piles & piles on rainbow sleds,
& listened for a knock, feet busting down the door.
But nothing came. I was there for hours, fell asleep until dawn —
party streamers & confetti still littering the streets.