@

When you died,

me and Curtis hurried to your bedside and

resentfully waited until you grew cold and uncomfortable.

Until your eyelids stayed down on

their own like

squeezed out Sun Kist juice boxes.

That after several hours

had decided to turn you spring colors,

carefully plodding your

pours for the second rate botflies

to utter and growl

and find fault with the early phases of

death.

But poems without titles need

drudge and graves; stumps and roots.

Toil and humility. Enterprise and face down

mourners. (It's  not enough to point @

and be dangerously out of pain.) Stakes

in the ground and machinery for pulling

our reluctant memory along. That

countenance will do us, barely alive,

just fine. 

Reviews

[Emily B]

You are a master craftsman. This is beyond. Quiet and austere and rattles with grief that can't be expressed yet.

[h d e rushin]

thank you dearest and happy belated Easter Sunday....dana

[Delmar Cooper]

This is good writing and I don't want to run the risk of damning with faint praise the lines foregoing of the last nine, but damn! the last nine were superb. Amazing construction, congratulations.

[h d e rushin]

thank you my friend for your kind remarks....dana

[jacob erin-cilberto]

reminds me of losing a parent...the eyelids finally stay down on their own...but even as the body grows cold, they remain alive to us...
and long after they are in the ground, they are alive in our memory....and sometimes rather than that being a comfort, it can scare us, haunt us...make us want to shut those eyes again, so that they cannot
eternally watch us.
j.

[h d e rushin]

i've been there of course. in fact we hold them in our hearts each hour. Thank you my friend....dana

[Corset]

I usually hide During the Ides of March, but it finds us anyway, I was at a funeral today and on the way home as if on cue the crepe Myrtles had all bloomed in white, pinks, and purples that I didn't see on the way to the church and it was over an hours drive to get to it, yet on the way back the colors were everywhere. You know I don't lie.
Particularly meaningful for me today: "Until your eyelids stayed down on
their own like
squeezed out Sun Kist juice boxes.
That after several hours
had decided to turn you spring colors,"

[h d e rushin]

i know you live in Texas...(somewhere that i have never been) and I know that seasons changing for us in Michigan are just the "tape delay" of what happens there. But Myrtle blooming in March is a mystical concept for those of us who live in the Midwest. Thanks for your reading my friend. And yes, I know you don't lie.....dana