APRIL
in memory of Donald Hall
Everything is coming back
but you.
The leaves on the maple,
the purple honeysuckle,
the warm air.
People are waking up
in the morning, making coffee,
making breakfast
for their children
and acting like you never existed.
Nothing stopped but you.
And that was the horrible part.
I remember the first time
I was hungry after you died
and how strange that felt.
The swallows and nightingales
and swifts.
Everything is coming back
without you.
LAST NIGHT
in memory of Ralph Angel
Last night an animal walked
slowly through the grass
in the yard and the moonlight
in the air. A slow animal
with muscles and teeth and fur.
I thought about what I would do
if instead of the yard it was
walking through my room,
walking toward my child’s bed
and everything felt horrible
and I remembered you had died
and the sound of the animal
slowly moved away and was gone.
If you were here
you would have walked out,
in bare feet, in the cold dark grass,
and put your arms around it.
PARENTAL DREAM
In this dream Carl has
his parents back,
back in a green kitchen
in Illinois. And Mark, Mark
has his father back
and is walking with him
right now in London,
holding hands beneath the gray
and white, needlepoint sky.
In this dream I am dying
and my children are filling
up an IV bag with red
Jell-O which, in the dream
I am having, is medicine.
In this dream Mike’s mother
remains alive
and the cancer she has fought
off for years
get’s washed away in a small
load of laundry
filled mainly with her husband’s
socks and underwear.
In this dream Dorianne’s
mother and Joe’s older brother
who was very like
a father both drive up in the same car.
My youngest bends over
the bed and pats me on the cheek
and says
poppa this medicine is going
to work cause’ it’s really yummy.
My oldest sits at the foot
of the bed and says
this is not going well, I think
we should just stop.
In this dream Sharon’s father
comes back but changed, kinder,
a man who only loves,
and my mother’s father
comes back too, still horribly
young and sits with his now
older-than-him daughter
and asks where his wife is
who just then walks into
the room in a blue summer dress
holding a porcelain bowl
of fat blackberries
and hands them to my oldest
son and says
feed these to that man in bed,
he has no idea
about the living or the dead.