running out of memory

the pity though is not that he is gone
has been for the last seventeen or so
years yielding them to someone’s separate life
detached from his to an autonomous person
an unacknowledged gift not his to pass
nor ours to keep for seventeen bitter years
turned loose and now entirely self-propelled

hold on i’ll tell you what the pity is
the time unlived by him is getting far
too long for us to trust the image claiming
our total memory within whose cells
his past unshapes itself there is no past
outside ourselves and what’s inside is ours
there is less room for someone else’s past
are we some fucking gods or what get real
he should have crossed that street with more discretion

now that i think who of all people is gone
he seldom comes to mind the crowd has grown
the pity is he’s dead again for good

gods know no sorrow in their blue demesne
being too eternal even to exist
they hardly bother to tell green from orange
come to think of it he was color-blind
leave gods alone we are the only problem
abandoned on the bitter winter pavement
cradling another’s life within our own

the spirit skunk

please do not lean on doors i never lean
on doors and barely tread upon the grass
but having shed most of my substance i
live at the outskirts of a zoo as yet
without full residence rights but with high hopes

the city visited by us while still
of blubbery mortal stuff is a half-way house
a thing to lean on tread upon and touch
urged not to but presumed to be enticed
yet once a proper coat of fur is grown
whiskers and wings and opalescent scales
one who may seem the very skunk transfixed
between the headlights is in fact a witness
from an impenetrable world apart

some of those canvases by edward hicks
have images of children in them bigger
than beasts themselves perhaps too full of pride
and blood emitting stale animal spirit
unlike the true spiritual animals
not predators or raptors anymore
yet game to no one either will they ever
settle themselves in plato’s bestiary
with the polonium lion the blue tooth
blue jay and oxen chiseled out of stars
the ghostly pastoral of time to come