Varieties of Posthumous Clarity

You or someone leads a life,
And maybe it’s a long one
Or worthy of its obits—

Notable, notorious—
And maybe you or someone
Get noted on the same day,

One in a hometown paper,
One internationally—
Obits are weird to compare.

Asking what defines the good
Human existence, well led,
Of obits is like asking

What defines a work of art
While wandering out of caves
Through auctions, museums,

And religious services.
The thing to be defined glows,
Blurs, vanishes, or shimmers

As if paralleling you,
Wandering with you, as if
It might not exist at all,

As if it asked the question,
As if small lives, like stained glass,
Were about catching some light

While the canonical life
Takes good, strong light as given,
Here to glare at other art.

Leaving Maps

Busily gilding the pirate’s trade,
The poets with cancer carry on
Searching for meaningful things to say

About treatment experiences,
The people one meets in the trenches,
The confusion of the end with God,

The confusion of the end without,
The little bastard pirates themselves,
Absorbed in boarding and slaughtering

Every organ they can commandeer,
Microscopic metaphors for all
Life, micro and macro, which won’t stop

Consuming life until life itself
Consumes life itself by life itself.

Children at the Birth

Confronted with the hidden
Wish to make some saying thing,
They couldn’t even say what,

They rolled the remaining bit
Of cut-away cylinder
From palm to palm in each hand,

So pleasant, four crisp corners,
The stone’s slightly oily feel,
The way the rich red rubbed off

Little smudges in their palms,
Which fit the stick of ochre
Better than adults’ hands had

Who had carved it down to this
Curing hides, using the ends
To cheetah-mark gaunt faces.

The children tried to make it
Do something else, something new,
Something they could do with it.

They picked up a thorny twig
From a corner of the cave
And settled, backs to the wall,

And started to scratch the soft
Stone with the points of the thorns,
Two lines matching the edges,

Then two criss-crossing lines, then
Two more crossing next to them,
Then another longer line—

Just scratching away, no one
From the hearth calling to them,
Low sun angling the cave mouth,

The long day sliding away.
Finally, they dropped the piece
And wandered off. A good day.