The world is a beautiful place 
                                                           to be born into 
if you don’t mind happiness 
                                             not always being 
                                                                        so very much fun 
       if you don’t mind a touch of hell
                                                       now and then
                just when everything is fine
                                                             because even in heaven
                                they don’t sing 
                                                        all the time

             The world is a beautiful place
                                                           to be born into
       if you don’t mind some people dying
                                                                  all the time
                        or maybe only starving
                                                           some of the time
                 which isn’t half so bad
                                                      if it isn’t you

      Oh the world is a beautiful place
                                                          to be born into
               if you don’t much mind
                                                   a few dead minds
                    in the higher places
                                                    or a bomb or two
                            now and then
                                                  in your upturned faces
         or such other improprieties
                                                    as our Name Brand society
                                  is prey to
                                              with its men of distinction
             and its men of extinction
                                                   and its priests
                         and other patrolmen
                                                         and its various segregations
         and congressional investigations
                                                             and other constipations
                        that our fool flesh
                                                     is heir to

Yes the world is the best place of all
                                                           for a lot of such things as
         making the fun scene
                                                and making the love scene
and making the sad scene
                                         and singing low songs of having 
                                                                                      inspirations
and walking around 
                                looking at everything
                                                                  and smelling flowers
and goosing statues
                              and even thinking 
                                                         and kissing people and
     making babies and wearing pants
                                                         and waving hats and
                                     dancing
                                                and going swimming in rivers
                              on picnics
                                       in the middle of the summer
and just generally
                            ‘living it up’

Yes
   but then right in the middle of it
                                                    comes the smiling
                                                                                 mortician

                                           

Work out. Ten laps.
Chin ups. Look good.

Steam room. Dress warm.
Call home. Fresh air.

Eat right. Rest well.
Sweetheart. Safe sex.

Sore throat. Long flu.
Hard nodes. Beware.

Test blood. Count cells.
Reds thin. Whites low.

Dress warm. Eat well.
Short breath. Fatigue.

Night sweats. Dry cough.
Loose stools. Weight loss.

Get mad. Fight back.
Call home. Rest well.

Don’t cry. Take charge.
No sex. Eat right.

Call home. Talk slow.
Chin up. No air.

Arms wide. Nodes hard.
Cough dry. Hold on.

Mouth wide. Drink this.
Breathe in. Breathe out.

No air. Breathe in.
Breathe in. No air.

Black out. White rooms.
Head hot. Feet cold.

No work. Eat right.
CAT scan. Chin up.

Breathe in. Breathe out.
No air. No air.

Thin blood. Sore lungs.
Mouth dry. Mind gone.

Six months? Three weeks?
Can’t eat. No air.

Today? Tonight?
It waits. For me.

Sweet heart. Don’t stop.
Breathe in. Breathe out.

On Sunday I wrote the obituary. I paused 
before accepting the job, which my brother  
gave me because I’m a poet. But it turned out 
to be the right thing to do: incident, incident, 
life. Windfall, child, marriage. Or none of those.  
Instead of focusing on the ghost  
in the room, I arranged the data of existence  
but left off the intimacies: the figs  
and ease, reversals, bothers. Which is to say,  
a certainty without the lightning  
behavior, his fat thumbs, a nice roundness 
to his bald head. How much we would miss.  
I couldn’t put in reasons or arguments, so I put in  
more periods. I slid sentences around  
until his life flowed. Decisive, incredibly sound.  
I put in what others remembered: dates,  
degrees, versions of what you tell people  
at parties. I built him a legend:  
column-length, tight. Sort of true.

I wear my grandmother’s teeth on my wrist. She mostly  
used her teeth for smiling. Hi gang! Big and open, her whole 
arm scribing overhead in joy as we approached. Seems  
almost caricature, but it was real. She was real. I miss her. I don’t 

know how she stayed, after all her losses, so cheerful, alone.  
Decades alone, widowed young, alone by choice 
in her bed. The teeth I wear are not from her mouth, but  
from a jaw older maybe even than humans: walrus, fossilized, 

bought before I was born that time she and her husband 
flew a small plane they could borrow cheap, thanks to  
his job at Boeing—details, details, the small gold chain 
that double-checks the bracelet’s clasp, how much security

the details give us—to Alaska. My goodness, the romance,  
the time, their lucky, white, poor and upwardly mobile, just- 
post-depression, educated selves. Those teeth of hers  
I wear are not recently of ocean or ice, and absolutely not 

of this new ocean, this new thin ice, but dug from earth  
and browned by earth, the rest of their original life gone. The  
nerves and blood, the soft gums, the sensitive, broad 
mystacial pad and its seeking whiskers. My grandmother 

wasn’t like a fossil, which is what some people get called  
when they get old. In the care home where she lived  
for a few years or months (time blurs), they said her smile hid  
her decline. I think again about the pass politeness, rote

manners, can give—their grace or shroud. Inside my mouth,  
all my teeth sit still in their sockets, minus little bits which, in some  
cases, are filled with expensive compounds my grandmother’s 
daughter could afford and which I did not tend or value

enough when their care became mine. I know how loose  
teeth can be when a life hasn’t held them or when life’s flush  
fades, when the flesh sags off. I’ve found so many seal jaws,  
dolphin jaws, porpoise jaws on the beach, in dunes, and, 

whether I pocket anything or not, I always wiggle them  
in their ragged sockets, count the cusps, touch each point, which  
tells me not what they said but who, as a species, they were.  
Are.  Hi, gang!  So sweet, so eager to see even our shitty, selfish 

teenage selves. Inside my mouth, there’s a whole lot  
of impolite, but I know how to close my lips around it.  
The teeth on my wrist from my grandmother might  
be fragile. I don’t know and can’t unless I try to break 

them. She was such a joyous force. She was such a joyous  
force. It makes me afraid to pull the bracelet over the knob  
of my wrist, to stretch the old elastic, because I have lost  
so much joy already, which is entirely my fault. She seemed, 

to me, to always be vibrant with care. The teeth are loose  
on my wrist. Once, someone put her finger on the small  
spur no one notices below the last knuckle of my hand and  
that is why I bought a different bracelet that touches me 

where she touched me, with the same, delicate precision.  
I hardly ever wear the other bracelet, the teeth, which  
are really little squares, like lozenges to ease a throat, and 
haven’t I been sore-voiced?  Hey, gang!  Her arms waving

like she was guiding a plane to the gate. The way  
she would love whoever saw her. Really. Whoever.

Like the dog who forgot 
where he buried his bone 

the old farmer forgot 
where he buried the dog.

Niece,
I remember when they cut your mother 
and pulled your sister out, then you, 
and how you cried and cried.
You never wanted to be here. 
Right from the start.

I open Mama’s old prayer book 
but the words billow like rain.
I wish you had loved
one thing enough to make you 
want to stay; the orange sunsets, 
your drooling dog, the fig tree
in the backyard, your twin sister’s mole, 
Cheerios in cold milk.

Washing your body now,
twenty-four years of bones and flesh 
laid out tall and stiff on this hard table, 
is the cruelest task.

I stand here full of heartbeat.
Touching you is like dipping hands in a cold sea.

I soak a porous sponge in water scented 
with rose, brush it against your neck, 
along your arms, those long, thin legs. 
There is a tampon still inside, the string 
hanging out like the detonator of a bomb.

Darkness bends over itself to devour 
what it will not hold—
the boy you loved watched you cry, 
take a handful of pills,
                                    and said nothing.

It is that my hands 
are also my father’s hands, 
and where the lines meet on the palm 
both of us have met 
and sat, each with his own silence 
not speaking. 
It is not that we are fighting 
It is the shape of love we have come to. 
He keeping to his script of being dead 
and I, doing the pose of the living in retaliation. 
It is the shape of love we have come to. 
On my way to the train this morning, 
I cut through a small field of elms 
and birches and thought I saw from afar 
a white cluster, a crown of egrets 
that had landed on the ground. 
But really it was a cemetery.
It was as though the gravestones were holding hands. 
It was the kind of thing that would have made him laugh: 
gravestones holding hands. 
I say this to him as 
he sits beside me 
And yes, he laughs. 
He reaches out his hands toward me. 
I pretend to not see the hands 
I keep to the pose of the living.