Youth
As a child I was safe
with you
as my candle
on the water (always
a favorite song that still
always reminds me
of you)
and you made
what was bad less so
and what was good
something that was
put up for auction
for the most smiles
stifled.
It took an effort.
There is so much everything in
this world, yet there is only so much
of what I am able to tell you about me
telling you about you and me and what
you mean to me.
I’ve tried for months,
years to put into words an exact definition,
an absolute sum of perfect, a punchline to a
a joke about love.
(sitting in a theater with you in the dark dodging buttery hands for the next grab of corn and talking about things that keep us from talking about how much corn we’re crunching and yet we talk so much eating and talking about what so and so did and so and so said and then the previews start playing and we both make the comment about how we finished the corn before the film even started it’s so corny I can’t even but it’s started so I won’t even try)
Health
we imagine – after – it being all okay and nothing to worry about yet we know we worry about it all the time – even after – and all the concentration can get weary on ones’ bones doesn’t it? and there’s the counting – always counting like age, something we can be proud of like our best days – even when things become worse or better (depending on the day) and yet – still yet – I can count on you when the bad days become a buffer that only a broth of thought can warm a soul enough to make a chicken out of the ghosts we are inevitably destined to become – a glob around the throat that chokes out the screams that come on the one, two, three – bright sails of light that lie in the mountain light outside the window and count on the questions the answers to which are laid bare on a television positioned so that only one of us can see but both of us can contemplate – such an island of pain neither of us has the ability to question, questioning only the ins and outs of needles and knives, the ability of the things flowing out of us to reveal a real relinquishment to the pain – things leaving us, as a matter of course – and how by leaving we leave what we left behind – a torture turned out by bags of blood and puss – and this is how health happens – by leaving and staying and leaving some more – the kind of absurdity that all the things that mom does mom does for a reason and that reason is well and good and all the things that make one son well enough to be able to
Hope
(we are too busy watching Jeopardy and Alex proclaims an answer about what Buzz Aldrin said upon leaving this earth and you said ‘blast off’ which made me so madly happy I had to take another pill to take care of the the pain the happy was causing my legs and laughing is being happy and being happy is being healthy and being happy at this moment makes me think – yes – this is possible, this)
What does this light-ridden stride
mean to us now – now that we can stop
calling with bad news and just call each-
other with the good
the good that never
stops being such, even if it just means
we went for a walk in the sun and it was
fine.
It takes effort.
You bring that bright best
of bloom further
closer to
that beam of what we can
call current
something cementing
something further in our hearts
so much labor, so long ago, and
so much labor, still
nice of you
to be so much something still.
