Death

A reading in memory of Martha Silano. 

I was a forty-one-year-old rabbit
that year, which was said to be unlucky
for the rabbits to go face-to…

I’m not the first man to lose his father
slowly, not the first to wonder
when I walk in the room if the…

You’d never call the branches
arms, though in certain
lights don’t pine and man
look like hands

conjoined…

i

The last time I lost you, I had turned
To salt. The hospice nurses all assured
An easier passing…

You may find her behind 

         Rowan Oak, a shadow 

              of fortress where then now 

         you find no real entry place. 

Every morning opening the newspaper, I am faced
with the thin line that divides disaster and deprivation
from a world of luminous wealth. Tuesday, January 29th,
for instance, bodies, many of them children, lie on the ground
They drowned in the canal trying to escape a weapons depot fire
and explosion in Lagos. Their heads are twisted in straw and dust
near the feet of on-lookers whose cries we cannot hear

Catherine Barnett on improv, misfit details, and the humor in elegy. 

What if you knew you'd be the last
to touch someone?
If you were taking tickets, for example,
at the theater…

Helen Vendler and Marjorie Perloff in the words of people who loved them.

I prayed for my friend to live and he didn’t. I held his puffy hand, his heart jumping green on the…

mom tells me I smell like
her Mom—
something flowery and 

the blackened endings
of a joint.
I feared her …

until the clock of my grandmother’s body
                   stopped working & her remains

were lowered into the earth on…

Do not tell her that Grandma is watching her from

        above. She is not religious.           (And nervous about the…

Because why not? Why not take the smashed pinecone 
of my life, render it in purple? Why not dream of…

Is this the last time I’ll admire the guys
in their neon-yellow slickers, guiding us
to our parking spots…

In Francisco Oller’s El Velorio, a child lies
on a table as if sleeping. It is covered in lace

and blossoms…