The day of your death, the hour hands and minute hands
on my nineteen dollar watch stopped,
but the second hand kept moving,
so it is time to count seconds, not hours that add up––
the rarest day since you were born.
In plural subject positions,
you died after years in diapers—
not sans, but con everything.
Music and poetry, the music of everything else
saved you, beat heaven and hell out of you.
What were your last words?
For fun I’ll guess, “The rest is noise.”
I remember our laughing and crying together.
Thank God you crashed our wedding.
We only spoke on the phone once or twice
after you fell and were “rehabilitated,”
longitude, latitude, and equator.
I don’t like to talk about “passing away.”
You make a pass at a lover—
You died. You’re dead. Disfortunate.
Now you are notes, bars, clefs, and rests.
I try on your old shoes but they don’t fit.
It would be nice to walk again in bare feet
on the Watermill beach with Jane Freilicher,
to stroll through the Louvre and Paris again
as we did with Pierre Martory.
You did not disappear in the dead of winter
but on September 3rd, 78 years after
World War 2 began.
It was close to the end of summer, a sad time of the year
when the Hudson waters are getting colder.
I still have time for idle chatter: some birds call,
it’s almost time to fly south. Night crawlers are wide awake.
Fawns are moving further away from their mothers.
I look out my window, no moon,
invisible, John's gifts of sustenance to others.
I see David Kermani's face in the clouds,
he's sleeping on John's pillow—
there's a darling empty bed not for sale.
I don’t see a single maple leaf changing color.
It was 50 degrees Fahrenheit last night,
this morning was a little chilly. I’ve got nothing
to say today except I wish it was beginning
summer for you. I who love the four seasons,
now wish it's always summer. Familiar strangers
keep winking at me with singular evil eyes,
mouths, ears, noses, and throats.
No need to tell you their names.
I think I have already beaten to death Mr. and Mrs. D.
Better to take a walk and feed my donkeys,
see what’s going on with all things green and flowering.
I salute dead trees as if a dead tree was a four-star general.
I hope a frog or ground hog notices me.
I sometimes sing Mozart or torch songs to my donkeys.
They bray along off key.
I’m blessed not lucky.
I write what I want to know.
These words are proof
how absolutely ordinary I am.
I can switch to meter.
I can curse and say “I love you”
in 5 or 6 languages
including Chinese.
I say again there are no circles
in Chinese calligraphy.
Noise.
I can remember the summer of 1930
in some ways better than I remember this summer:
I learned that summer to swim in Lake Hopatcong.
What am I doing floating, not going anywhere?
It’s hard not to go anywhere just to stand still—write nothing.
I could begin, just write the alphabet:
A for amour
B for bat and bather
C for cunt, calligraphy and Cervantes
If I knew a baby born on this day, I would wash out
its placenta and make a placenta soup:
add a little lemon juice, dill, a spoonful of tomato paste,
a cup of white wine, fresh vegetables.
Reader, you are invited to my house for soup—
call what I have written placenta soup.
I could list the names of those who loved John in ink,
let squid and cuttlefish write for
those who can no longer sign their names.
I think it’s better to be left as ink than ashes.
Music is the food of love. Play on.