once, as a boy, and hated the way it

felt to hurt someone. He loved

that I was not mean, I was actually gentle—

if it went over into syrupy,

he would hok me. Only I—only

this one who had left him, and come back as his soul-mate—

could he joke with about coffin worms.

Month after month, his horror of death

decreased. When everyone was out of the house I’d

jungle-gym up into the hospice trough—he could

no longer move—

and jam myself, softly, in

sideways between the gaunt mountain

of him, and the rail, and we’d choke up, for a moment,

with relief, and then we’d be asleep

for an hour of the imaginary

serene. Imagine being able

to calm the one you love best,

who loves you best,

I had never thought it would come to that, though I’d been

practicing, marching up and

down the redwood decks of that small

boat of a church—speaking, as if I was

Carl speaking to me: Yo, though I

walk through the valley of the shadow of death,

I shall fear no evil, for thou art with me.

The Box

The long, pale box of unfinished

pine had a pink branch, with bark,

for a strong handle, running along each

side—up each side, from the dear,

icy cold, naked feet,

to his head, at peace for the first time

since his conception. There was a pair of brown

knotholes in the side facing us,

and lines of grain in rivulets.

After the shepherd, the want, the green

pastures, the lid looked loose to me a moment,

as if the six-point New Hampshire pine

star rose and fell, and then

they wheeled my darling down the, up the

aisle on the trolley’s crisscross legs

and wheels, to the deep rectangle

dug, straight down, with clean edges—

black layer of topsoil, then the

sheer faces of dirt, tree rootlets

breaking out into the air like delicate

worms. And the Rabbi called out, as if

in grief, Chaim Ben Ephraim!—and the

beautiful man traveled, without

moving, back into the earth he had come from, and had

made his first cry of his own.

The first back-of-the-shovel drop

of dirt onto that beautiful box, that

beautiful boy, was an awful sound,

but then the scoops of sandy soil

began to sound like the work of our kind,

honorable, requiring deep

breath and sweat. I took some, from the pile, and put my

hand in my pocket and rubbed my fingers

and thumb, laying up treasure. Then I

plucked a dead cello string from a

red pine so it would not scratch the Rabbi’s

hat, and then I saw they had put a

little sign on a stick in the crown

of the mound, like an upside-down flower-seed packet,

to say what is there, with his name on it like

Snowdrop, Double Bloodroot, Closed Gentian.

After an Epitaph on an English Headstone

I count myself blessed that I did not have to

go through your death in the presence of God.