Dead Uncles Coming to Grips

In my heart the red bird never moves or sings.

 

Shadows, shingles, shit storms.

 

Traveling on 495 South, passing the exit for Fall River, something in me catching itself before tears come (and later yet wondering where do the tears go and what happens to the grief for whom they are such loyal emissaries).

 

And then it came, the end of love, and everything grew brighter as if suddenly that which all along had been hidden became the hot sun, a living fire. 

 

Monks dying with the word of God on their lips.

 

I mean traveling through history with this sense of justice and a woman who helps you live it, both of you surviving your many fuck-ups. 

 

Noodles with peanut sauce, chicken fried in sesame oil.

 

The blue of the ocean when you are under it and open your eyes.

 

I can no longer say “I am not an Elm tree.”

 

Dandelions insisting we not give up on beauty.

 

Gulping wine in the truck, then mouthwash, then spitting and staggering into junior year, and years later in Vermont final exams drunk on Jack Daniels, and a couple years after that a homeless dropout in Boston wondering is this the way it ends.

 

Storms off Cape Cod, against which we anchored, privately praying we would last the night.

 

And the nuns in El Salvador.

 

And the brutal chains they placed on the elephants.

 

In fact, there sometimes are atheists in fox holes.

 

Yoked by crowns on the altar, each of us holding a candle, the candles yoked with a single white ribbon, how boring it was, and how dead, and how we saved it all by dancing together after for seven hours, ignoring everyone.

 

One day I will write the last sentence I will ever write, and that will be the last sentence ever.

 

Making clear I’m about to come asking may I.

 

In Bronson Brook, my heart.

 

Dead uncles coming to grips with what the afterlife means in terms of those who are not yet in it.