Men Keep on Dying

              to the memory of Denis Johnson

The stranger bites into an orange

and places the rind between us

on the park bench.

It becomes a small raft of fire.

I came here to admire

the iron-lit indifference

of the geese on the pond.

The summers here

are a circuit in parallel

with everything I cannot say,

wrote the inventor

before he was hanged

from the bridge

this park is named after.

His entire life devoted

to capturing inextinguishable light

in a teardrop of enamel.

He was hanged for touching

the forehead of another man

in the wrong century.

The only thing invented

by the man I lost yesterday

was his last step into a final

set of parenthesis.

I came here to watch the geese

and think of him.

The stranger and I

share the orange rind

as an ashtray.

He lights my cigarette

and the shadows of our hands

touch on the ground.

His left leg is amputated

below the knee

and the bell tower rings

above the town.

I tell him my name

and he says nothing.

With the charred end of a stick

something shaped like a child

on the other side of the pond

draws a door on a concrete wall

and I wonder where the dead

wait in line to be born.