gathering in springs, then rising without our agency,

only to dissolve in mist or cloud or dew.

This is a prayer to unbelief,

to candles guttering and darkness undivided,

to incense drifting into emptiness.

It is the smile of a stone Madonna

and the silent fury of the consecrated wine,

a benediction on the death of a young god,

brave and beautiful, rotting on a tree.

This is a litany to earth and ashes,

to the dust of roads and vacant rooms,

to the fine silt circling in a shaft of sun,

settling indifferently on books and beds.

This is a prayer to praise what we become,

“Dust thou art, to dust thou shalt return.”

Savor its taste—the bitterness of earth and ashes.

This is a prayer, inchoate and unfinished,

for you, my love, my loss, my lesion,

a rosary of words to count out time’s

illusions, all the minutes, hours, days

the calendar compounds as if the past

existed somewhere—like an inheritance

still waiting to be claimed.

Until at last it is our litany, mon vieux,

my reader, my voyeur, as if the mist

steaming from the gorge, this pure paradox,

the shattered river rising as it falls—

splintering the light, swirling it skyward,

neither transparent nor opaque but luminous,

even as it vanishes—were not our life.

UNSAID

So much of what we live goes on inside—

The diaries of grief, the tongue-tied aches

Of unacknowledged love are no less real

For having passed unsaid. What we conceal

Is always more than what we dare confide.

Think of the letters that we write our dead.

FINDING A BOX OF FAMILY LETTERS

The dead say little in their letters

they haven’t said before.

We find no secrets, and yet

how different every sentence sounds

heard across the years.

My father breaks my heart

simply by being so young and handsome.

He’s half my age, with jet-black hair.

Look at him in his navy uniform

grinning beside his dive-bomber.

Come back, Dad! I want to shout.

He says he misses all of us

(though I haven’t yet been born).

He writes from places I never knew he saw,

and everyone he mentions now is dead.

There is a large, long photograph

curled like a diploma—a banquet sixty years ago.

My parents sit uncomfortably

among tables of dark-suited strangers.

The mildewed paper reeks of regret.

I wonder what song the band was playing,

just out of frame, as the photographer

arranged your smiles. A waltz? A foxtrot?

Get out there on the floor and dance!

You don’t have forever.

What does it cost to send a postcard

to the underworld? I’ll buy

a penny stamp from World War II

and mail it downtown at the old post office

just as the courthouse clock strikes twelve.

Surely the ghost of some postal worker

still makes his nightly rounds, his routine

too tedious for him to notice when it ended.