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}

There are 33 joints in each foot—
hinges of flesh, bone, and bioelectric fire.
It began with Adam and Eve,
and the first suspicion of pain.
Fingers, those ten cephalic feelers,
mapped each other’s dermatomes—
a moist cartography,
each twitch an omen.
They curled into prayers or fists or pleas,
their joints aching with remembered grip,
phantom swellings, clicking doubts
that flared in the absence of injury.
Ankles, those delicate gyroscopes,
tilted in communion,
bones rolling over sinew like tides over sand—
but always, the mind mishears the surf.
Heel, arch, ball, toe—
a sacred sequence of contact and release,
now catalogued nightly in fretful repetition:
Is this stiffness new? Did that bone shift?
The feet, those twin archives of motion,
carried them through Eden’s loam,
through grit, through ash,
through every imagined rupture.
Each step a gospel of nerve and nail,
each crack a Morse code warning.
Anxiety loops around the metatarsals
like ivy climbing calcium walls.
Diagnosis: hallux valgus,
recommend surgical intervention.
But the real ache grows
in the space between scans.

Stars and people and daffodils won’t last forever.
Hands down, forever will succumb to a single sensation,
one last heaven, one last shudder     
lost voice carried over the winds of the body, the canyons
of the hands in a shower, snow or warm? Last ashes
of satisfaction dance above an open mouth, teeth like light
in an emptied room, the wet music of the tongue.
Somebody will find the edge to all of humanity’s joy, a flood,
a punctuation will flood her with its certainty,
or them, or us, all at once, and that lonely breach
will ripple through, on and out, with indefatigable atoms.
Those asking hands never to slow their speeding ship     
one last starry daffodil excess will blow its soft dunes,
that lost voice, back, over everything that ever came
before. Until emptied out. And if you slow, if you slowly reach
across your own body until you feel it, too, even now?
You can come to an end, even now. It lasts, wanting to.

I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.

All but Death can be

Adjusted ;

Dynasties repaired,

Systems settled in their

Sockets,

Centuries removed, —

Wastes of lives resown

With colors

By superior springs,

Death — unto itself exception —

Is exempt from change.