commencement address
If you live on the cutting edge,
surely you'll get cut.
If you live the simple life,
it won't be simple.
If you sit at a desk composing words
the alphabet will mock you,
or you'll drown in the currents
of the page.
Work hard. Be lazy.
Money will come and go
like green leaves in their season.
But don't forget
the wise man and the fool
are blood brothers.
At the end
what matters
is the sun, the moon:
arterial red, bone white.
at the edge
It's a long way down
to darkness and fire
and the wings of night birds
making unruly sounds.
To dismantled clocks.
To shoes filled with tears
and garments torn
in boredom and grief.
But here at the edge
of the abyss
the tea is the amber color
of comfort,
the biscuits are crisp
and sweet
as you feed them to me
with loving hands.
ghosts
We abandon the dead as they
abandoned us. But sometimes my mother's ghost sits at the foot of the bed trying to comfort me for all the other losses: my father longing to be forgiven, to forgive; the long line of cousins and aunts patiently waiting their turns to be remembered; the dogs who were my shadows once whining now at the gates of the afterlife. My mother smooths my pillow as though it were a field of snow ready to be plowed by dreams where for brief moments my dead come back: Jon as a toddler in my uncle's army cap, Franny with the rosary of days slipping through her fingers. At times I wander through the library of graves, reading the headstones, remembering a place where the ashes I scattered once blew back on the wind, staining my forehead with their dark alphabet.
In the house where I grew up, the same sentinel trees shade the porch as they shaded the green years of my childhood when my dead were alive and full of promise.