O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
       But O heart! heart! heart!
         O the bleeding drops of red,
           Where on the deck my Captain lies,
             Fallen cold and dead.

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up- for you the flag is flung- for you the bugle trills,
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths- for you the shores a-crowding,
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
       Here Captain! dear father!
         This arm beneath your head!
           It is some dream that on the deck,
             You’ve fallen cold and dead.

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,
The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;
       Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
         But I with mournful tread,
           Walk the deck my Captain lies,
             Fallen cold and dead.

We sit on our skeletons’ bones. 
We hear with our skeletons’ bones.
We speak of beauty by moving our jaws and our teeth.

The original meaning of Paradise: a place, 
a walled garden. 
Our lives, our stories, this hour inside one.
A staircase from Piranesi. A hummingbird drinking.

Outside it, vanishing species and rivers.
Outside it, Nanjing, Ninevah, Dresden.
Outside it, Gaza, Sudan, Myanmar, Kyiv. Here.

The world starts and ends, starts, ends, ends again,
restarts.  

A kalpa is brief, and wall-less.

Unborn ones, take nothing for granted.
Not nectar, not thirst.

May your lives be uneclipsed, your failures be passing.

May you have your portions of beauty, of grief, 
in a garden whose plants and birds I cannot imagine. 

Since you ask, most days I cannot remember.
I walk in my clothing, unmarked by that voyage.
Then the almost unnameable lust returns.

Even then I have nothing against life.
I know well the grass blades you mention,
the furniture you have placed under the sun.

But suicides have a special language.
Like carpenters they want to know which tools.
They never ask why build.

Twice I have so simply declared myself,
have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy,
have taken on his craft, his magic.

In this way, heavy and thoughtful,
warmer than oil or water,
I have rested, drooling at the mouth-hole.

I did not think of my body at needle point.
Even the cornea and the leftover urine were gone.
Suicides have already betrayed the body.

Still-born, they don’t always die,
but dazzled, they can’t forget a drug so sweet
that even children would look on and smile.

To thrust all that life under your tongue!—
that, all by itself, becomes a passion.
Death’s a sad Bone; bruised, you’d say,

and yet she waits for me, year after year,
to so delicately undo an old wound,
to empty my breath from its bad prison.

Balanced there, suicides sometimes meet,
raging at the fruit, a pumped-up moon,
leaving the bread they mistook for a kiss,

leaving the page of the book carelessly open,
something unsaid, the phone off the hook
and the love, whatever it was, an infection.

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.

The best ones 
I ever ate I ate

that summer, him dead 
six months, me not yet

forevered again 
to anyone. Tomatoes

the only fever, many- 
chambered, jelly-seeded

—probably slicers, 
nothing rare. Dissected

into the same glass bowl 
night after night for a dinner

date with the pulpy sun 
on its way through

my yard. Fayetteville, 
Arkansas, city of wreckage.

Mozzarella, basil, salt. 
Oil, the August air

humid, nearly liquid. 
One evening I sat

on my back stoop 
in a puddle of light

and knew I could live 
without him, and was. 

I ate the same dinner 
from the same bowl

until the decision 
ceased to be a decision.

^{If I die, I want a loud death. I don’t want to be just 
breaking news, or a number in a group, I want a death
that the world will hear, an impact that will remain
through time, and a timeless image that cannot be
buried by time or place. 
         —Fatima Hassouna, Gaza photo journalist,
         on April 15, before her death on April 16, 2025}

Like the sound waves in space that tear 
the remnants of supernovas, and twist the paths
of light
           so maybe this is why some spiral galaxies 
like Messier 77 resemble ears. 
                                                   But also when  
sunset splinters its light over the ridgeline and 
the fireflies in this ravine cry desperately to save it,
  
or when the embers from last night’s crackling 
campfire tremble, 
     or when our dog begins to fear
the sounds we do not hear,
        then we know those waves
have touched us too.
                         For it is the silence after 
the plane’s screech or the missile’s strike,
a kind of voiceless scream
                                           that her photos captured
even as she stood among the rubble looking up
as if those waves could also signal a moment’s
desperate hope.
                        There is so much we do not hear—
the rumble of shifting sand dunes, the purr and drum 
of the wolf spider, the echoes of bats, the explosions 
on the sun, the warning cry of the treehopper, but

it’s the cry of those buried alive we so often refuse
to hear as too distant or beyond our reach to help,

yet even an elephant’s infrasound, which can be 
detected by herd members as far as 115 miles
brings them to safety,
which tells us, well, 
tells us what?
                             It was Jesus (Luke 19:40)
who said if these keep silent, then the very stones
will cry out.
                      Here, the news moves on to the next
loudest story,
                      or some chat on the phone blares
the latest scandal, score or personal interest.
In Gaza, 
one journalist warned, a press vest makes you a target.

In one photo a hand reaches through the rubble is if 
it were reaching to speak, 16 April 2025, from Al-Touffah.

In the end, it was the sound of her home collapsing.

In the end, we are all targets in our silences.

In the end, we know her absence the way each syllable 
shouts its lament, pleading from inside each of these words.

It’s one of those days since he died when

I see people in the crowd who look like friends  
from two thousand miles away.  
                                    There’s a profile like Judy’s 
with the same austere short hair and deep-set eyes. 
I catch myself tearing up. 
                                    Look, the neighbor boy Ian 
stands by the fountain, no matter he’s now grown 
and works in Hollywood. 
                                    The Mexican polka band 
has no tuba but a plugged-in keyboard oom-pahs- 
oom-pahs. When the singer 
                                    turns he is my poetry prof 
who learned remote viewing at the Monroe Institute 
and still plays chess. 
                                    No one looks like my Tom. 
A forgotten librarian salsas by double time 
in this audience of dancers. 
                                    Floating crowd faces multiply                        
inside my mind like wet petals—apparitions 
of long-term grief. 
                                    It’s one of those days.  
You, Reader, pass by and look familiar even though 
we do not touch. 
                                    We have never even met.

If I must die, 
you must live
to tell my story
to sell my things
to buy a piece of cloth
and some strings, 
(make it white with a long tail)
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
while looking heaven in the eye
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze—
and bid no one farewell
not even to his flesh
not even to himself—
sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above
and thinks for a moment an angel is there
bringing back love
If I must die
let it bring hope
let it be a tale

^{November 27, 2011}

^{My lonely days are over 
—Etta James}  

Etta must have known
she crooned this for when I die 
and find you at last

tall and dreamy, at the gate, again
after that one summer with words 
like that crimson-tinted mango

up there, in the limbs above us
about to spill, but left unsaid  
for next summer, that never came

but the words to be said: you
remembered, like yesterday
—the bad day on which they killed you.

They keep killing you Stephen
and it is always, always yesterday
where you never outwear

that cream and black striped T; 
you never outwear that smile— 
looking down on me

with your impossible height
as if already from the sky
and me, barely above the gate

by which we stand, talk and long
to say, to do, to do
to do and say so much at last.

And Etta croons: you smile and then the spell was cast
and here we are in heaven (Stephen)    
for you are mine at last.

^{(59 C.E., Bay of Baiae)}

The ship a tall flame on water
Agrippina drags herself onto shore

covered in sand and water greens
She pants on her back awhile

A light there on her eyes—
she opens  sees a bright blade

There is no stopping what has
already happened   A band latches

on my throat       I want her to have
power of command here too

to slow the inevitable
down to tenderness

Wait   she says
and he does

They sit cross-legged
telling of things—every

moment that led to this one
But time passes

There is no more to tell   Agrippina
grows quiet    I suppose you

should kill me    The man looks away
Here  she says    trains the knife

on her womb       Do it here so
maybe he  too  will feel it