(The Celtic Halloween)

In the season leaves should love,

since it gives them leave to move
through the wind, towards the ground
they were watching while they hung,
legend says there is a seam
stitching darkness like a name.

Now when dying grasses veil

earth from the sky in one last pale
wave, as autumn dies to bring
winter back, and then the spring,
we who die ourselves can peel
back another kind of veil

that hangs among us like thick smoke.

Tonight at last I feel it shake.
I feel the nights stretching away
thousands long behind the days
till they reach the darkness where
all of me is ancestor.

I move my hand and feel a touch

move with me, and when I brush
my own mind across another,
I am with my mother's mother.
Sure as footsteps in my waiting
self, I find her, and she brings

arms that carry answers for me,

intimate, a waiting bounty.
"Carry me." She leaves this trail
through a shudder of the veil,
and leaves, like amber where she stays,
a gift for her perpetual gaze.

In worded a world
how broken
from beginning:
sunburst and blossoms all
subterfuges
of creation ruses

of beauty –
fragrant thicket no less
complicit:

we exist
in a shattered vessel
shards at our bate feet –

Someone’s mother cries out

Stand still or
you’ll get hurt – and

you try hard in the slivered

moment
not to move.

(2)
Day asks: What does it matter
puting this anticipated
loss

on the page our

un-readiness
for imagined emptiness

of after –
why
direct half-

worded sorrow to tell

his tale or
your own

inked in another – it’s

just another
loss what

does it matter
it has always been
already

shattered –
Day asks
then asks again.

(3)
Because what
can be said?
In the end

the spoken stands

with bare spindly arms
around

its unspoken
brother what
fear

fastens
with tight knots to
your ravaged throat so

what you do
speak is always
poor and pale

shadows
of what
you do not.

(4)

You are dying.

But you do not say so

we do not say –
together

in steadfast
not-saying
alone

the winds orbit

echoing inner chambers where
we linger in

your researching
options thick
folders of studies

long letters to the scattered

family reports
of shifting numbers

platelets and neutrophiles

knotted
defiance of

your fall.

(5)

But our alphabet

aleph-bet
aleph

prepares itself
for radical
unraveling:

aleph at
abyss edge
acerbic sky above and
air or ache all
abeyant but un
 abating

bet because
ballast or balm
bond to
before behind be
always

aleph
again un
availed avale our
Av awhile then
away and
absent

Aba

(6)

Six feet tall broad and bearded

traveling a world
(in a hospital bed)

professor and scientist

(huddled under
the covers)

in coat and tie commanding

(post-chemo hair white wisps
wistfully

soft) an auditorium
of students.
When I’d describe you

it would always be:

He’s a large man, he fills
the room (wound

at your neck
gaping) oh
small child

of poverty –
always
your wide-chested gestures

of generosity.

(7)

Thus loss
installs itself among us looses
an arrow –

Bow bent
we are set
as mark for the arrow

into unblemished skies

scars each hour our
forever altered

father
failing
falling

toward
harrowed

Oh bollow

the heart’s a
hollow, a hole in which, a window in
which, a cloud –

earth.

(8)
Cut loose (not
yet) we are
at

a loss
we are
in

a loss
and
lost in

lost to
what
we are

bound to
bound by
now slowly

losing
in days
and numbered

hours.

(9) Dream-inquiry 1

There were mourners in the orchard

under the almond blossoms
wrapped in black
prayer shawls
their feet bare in the dirt
heads bowed
before day’s last
golden thread & hue and
I knew
when night would
lie down at last among
nestled leaves in
the steep
and stolen instant, then
the gathered mourners
together
would lift their black shawls
to suddenly tassled winds
and take
flight –

Death’s shadow
is always white.